Instagram Mute

Instagram now lets you mute your friends

By Jacob Kastrenakes@jake_k  


At long last, Instagram is adding the option to mute people from appearing in your feed. With an update rolling out “over the coming weeks,” you’ll be able to choose to remove someone’s posts, or both their posts and their stories, from appearing on Instagram’s main screen. You’ll still be able to view a muted person’s profile; you can unmute them any time you want; and the person won’t be told that they’ve been muted.



Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales

This feature is long overdue. While you can always unfollow someone, that often isn’t a realistic option — you can’t unfollow a close relative just because they post 12 times a day, for instance, even if they really deserve it. Now you’ll be able to choose to mute the offending profile instead, thus preserving any IRL relationships. (If only there was an option to automatically like one of their posts a day, too.

Social media networks are often slow to add mute features, presumably because they’d rather have as much content to display to you as possible. But as networks get older and older, and people add more and more friends on them, their feeds start to get clogged up. Adding a mute button is far more respectful of our actual relationships, so it’s about time that Instagram added one. I apologize in advance to all my coworkers.