Facing Mounting Criticism, Instagram Launches Notification-Pausing 'Quiet' Mode

Thursday Instagram launched "Quiet mode" to "help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers.... Once enabled, you won't receive any notifications, your profile's activity status will change to 'In quiet mode' and we'll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you.... and once the feature is turned off, we'll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed."

A report from the Verge notes the move "comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls." Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens....

Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode "when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night." However, the platform doesn't state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn't say what timeframe it considers "late at night." Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after "several minutes."
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is "putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place." The company's rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa....

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you've given each app. It doesn't seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you'll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in "the coming months."

Or . . .

[quonset]

And I'm just spitballing here, you could NOT go onto the site. Don't visit it. It's quite simple. See, I'm doing now. Not visiting.

Personal responsibility is dead.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Instagram isn't even a website. Meta takes steps to prevent any access of it that is not done through their permissions-hungry mobile app.
If you have that app, it pushes a lot of notifications to you that don't depend on you "going onto the site".

Re:

[quonset]

Fine. How difficult is it for someone to remove the software from their phone? Same thing, different method. They're still not going there.

Re:

[Mononymous]

How difficult is it for someone to remove the software from their phone?

If it was pre-installed, then way too difficult for the average user.

Re:

[Mr. Slippery]

You're been able to post to IG from the website for a while now.

Re: Or . . .

[ljw1004]

Personal responsibility is dead? ...

It was killed by the onslaught of a trillion dollar industry which uses the best science, psychology, behavioral manipulation and lobbying that money can buy. In advertising and the food industry. In the face of this, we individuals with our normal brains have lost the fight. Our personal responsibility was adequate to the task when there was a more level playing field, a decent chance of fighting back, but we're now outclassed and outgunned.

Re:

[sinkskinkshrieks]

Walk outside in any city and try to not see dopamine screen addicts about to be run over crossing the street without looking.

There's personal responsibility on one side, and engineered addiction and manufactured consent on the other. People are demonstrably influenceable. The fool is the one who disbelieves and believes in "free will". Sorry, anthropocentric primate, you're a chemical machine, there is no "soul", and everything you do is a consequence of matter and energy rather than "you". "You" are essent

Re:

[Mr. Slippery]

Or use it but disable notifications. Or turn on do-not-disturb mode, like I usually have on. There's three people in universe whose calls or DM deserve instant attention from me, and none of them would contact me via IG, so.

Batchgram

[flyingfsck]

I think a service rename may be in order.

It didn't have this?

[sound+vision]

What kind of bullshit messaging app doesn't let you turn notifications off, and why are people using it?

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

What kind of bullshit messaging app doesn't let you turn notifications off

You can turn off notifications from any app by disabling them in your phone's "Settings" menu.

The point of "Quiet Mode" is not that you can disable notifications but that they are queued up and delivered en mass when you turn Quiet Mode off.

If that feature isn't useful to you, don't use it.

Re:

[sound+vision]

Trust me, I'll never be using that feature, nor any other feature of the app.

I'm just trying to understand why all my homies out here doin it for the gram.

Re:

[Doriswoodard]

I agree with you, in fact there are many apps that are quite strange and unclear why people use this one, for me the internet is a good source to do my homework because not long ago I found this https://papersowl.com/do-my-essay [papersowl.com] and for me it is very convenient because I manage to work and study at the same time. Because these guys do my essay paper I get a lot of free time to occupy myself with what I like and live life in pleasure, I am glad that I was born in such a period, in fact, the internet changed

As someone who uses Instagram

[Mean Variance]

I see useful comments like "just delete it." Fine, that's one solution. I did that for Facebook and Twitter. I still kind of like Instagram and actually have a few personal connections through there.

But I also don't need to be dinged about everything either. IG isn't the only culprit. I am in a few group texts which I really don't care for SMS/Messages for groups. But they're my friends and it's not that big of a deal. I use mute conversation from iOS messages.

Anyway back to IG, I decided I make it work for

lied about age

[pitch2cv]

Every kid I know has lied about their age when they made such accounts, simply because they were too young to be legally allowed on any such platforms.

So if this new notification (cool huh, a notification to get less notifications) is only going to appear for youngsters, it's not going be shown to them because they told the platform they were 10y older.
So yes, I call total bullshit. Legal dept came up with this to soothen the legislators.

Also, good to read an analogy to cigarette smoking and social media ad

Re:

[burni2]

You are so right.

Some time ago I tutored a girl in school "programing/cs" and math, and she turned out to be talented. However when a somewhat local "Insta" fame ever struck her, the distraction and chaos took over and literally destroyed small steps of work.

My conclusion

[GeekWithAKnife]

Algorithms and UI designers got so good at hacking people that the less aware are simply victims. The plethora of lost young women posting 17 selfies of themselves everyday shows you how broken and unhealthy this is. I've no FB, Instagram or even a Twitter account. Very glad for it. My connections are fewer but deeper and more meaningful. People have to arm themselves with knowledge of how these social platforms are grabbing their attention and monetising it. They know what you look at, how long you loo