The “Quiet mode” will help you focus and stop checking who liked your photo and who sent you yet another meme or reel. Instagram says that the new feature was made after hearing feedback from teen users. “Teens have told us that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and might be looking for more ways to focus at night, while studying, and during school,” Instagram writes. And if FOMO is strong, once the feature is turned off, you’ll see a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed.

Once you enable the “Quiet mode,” you won’t receive any notifications over the time frame you set. I use it on my phone during working hours, so I don’t get notifications from anywhere and I keep missing calls from couriers. But with Instagram’s feature, your profile’s activity status will also change to “In quiet mode.” If anyone messages you during this time, they’ll get an automatic reply to tell them that you’re away. I hope you’ll get to customize that message, as it’s not clear from Instagram’s announcement.

Instagram notes that the “Quiet mode” is available to everyone, but it will prompt teens to use it when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night. Right now it’s being launched across the US, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Instagram “hopes to bring it to more countries soon.” I’ll keep my fingers crossed that us in Serbia get it soon!

Other new features on Instagram

In addition to the “Quiet mode,” Instagram has also introduced some new features that allow people to let them know what content they don’t want to be recommended. In your Explore feed, you can now select and hide multiple pieces of content in bulk if they don’t interest you. Additionally, when you select “Not interested” on a post seen in Explore, Instagram says it will “aim to avoid” showing you similar content in other places like Reels, Search, and more.

Then, there’s another feature I’ll find super-useful, especially in January when I’m bombarded by ads for weight loss programs, again. A similar feature already exists for DMs and comments, and it lets you filter out specific words. It can now be extended to recommended posts anywhere on Instagram. You can add a word, a list of words, emojis, or hashtags that you want to avoid – and Instagram will, again, “work to no longer recommend” such content. This probably means you’ll still see some of it, but less than before. You can access this in the Hidden Words section of Privacy settings. And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and add “weight loss,” “wall pilates,” and “keto” to my hidden words list.

via Engadget