In a rare move, Facebook is making an update that almost no one should dislike. After a few months of testing, the social network has begun rolling out a Snooze button—a discreet way to temporarily block someone’s posts from your feed.
The tool, which removes an individual’s posts from your News Feed for a month, is the perfect solution for the friend who goes on a days-long political tirade, or the cousin who keeps posting baby photos—but their baby hasn’t quite reached the stage of being “cute” yet. In its blog post, Facebook offers two more optimistic Snooze-worthy scenarios: That your uncle is posting too many photos of his new cat, or a friend is “tempting you with endless photos of ramen” on a visit to Japan.
It works like this: To Snooze someone in your News Feed, navigate to the menu icon in the upper right of their post. Then, select “Snooze.” This will hide content from that person, page, or group from your timeline for 30 days. After that, you’ll get a notification that their Snooze period has expired and their posts will reappear, interspersed in your News Feed like normal. Snoozing someone does not affect how or how often he sees your posts in his News Feed.
Like Facebook’s other discreet News Feed management options—Unfollowing and Hiding—the person you’ve snoozed isn’t notified that you’ve done so. But Snooze lies somewhere between those two options: Hiding only removes an individual post from your feed; Unfollowing, in comparison, hides all of someone’s posts from your feed, for an indeterminate amount of time. Hiding isn’t particularly useful except in potentially teaching Facebook’s algorithms what type of posts you do and don’t like seeing. Unfollowing, while helpful, feels more extreme. Maybe you don’t want to see Aunt Susan’s posts today or next week, but sooner or later she’ll post something you’ll want to know about. The Snooze button offers a happy medium.
Enabling the Snooze feature certainly seems useful—especially ahead of the holidays, a time of excessive oversharing. The update is also interesting in light of a report Facebook released on Friday. Facebook researchers David Ginsberg and Moira Burke examined the question: Is spending time on social media bad for us? After citing explanations on both sides of the issue, the researchers concluded that there’s a distinction—it’s not how much time you spend on social media, but how you use that time that affects your well-being. “We’re working to make Facebook more about social interaction and less about spending time,” they write as a conclusion to their investigation. Updating the quality of your Facebook News Feed, including the addition of this Snooze feature, is one way the company is working on the issue.
If users aren’t happy scrolling through their feed, that’s also a threat to Facebook’s long-term outlook. In an ideal world, Facebook wants you to spend lots of time interacting on the social network—and be happy about it—so you keep coming back for that dopamine rush again and again. If you’re constantly barraged by negativity, such as one person hijacking your news feed with ill-informed opinions, you might start distancing yourself from the platform.
The Snooze feature is one way Facebook hopes to make its social media experience less frustrating, and it certainly seems to be a move in the right direction. It’s as immediate as hiding a post, but puts no onus on you to remember to re-follow someone in the future—which should eliminate that twinge of guilt about removing him from your feed. The biggest potential negative is that the feature will be used to block differing viewpoints and reinforce personal biases.
While there’s plenty of other work Facebook can do to improve the News Feed experience ahead of the drama that’s sure to be the 2018 election cycle, this was a smart update to make.
