One of the largest social networks, Facebook, is testing its new feature called ‘Snooze’ that will let users temporarily hide updates from pages, groups or other users in their feeds. Snooze appears as an alternative option alongside unfollow function when you tap on the three dots next to a post. Once selected, this new function acts in the same way as unfollow option but with a time limit of 24 hours, 7 days or a whole month, along with an already existing option to permanently unfollow the poster. Facebook explains this new feature as a tool for people to take more control over their news feeds, tailoring what they get to see more of and put pages and users that often spam content on a time-out. It could also help pages and groups keep their user base during traffic-heavy periods like promotions or the large influx of news articles, with having them fear less about losing their fans and members.
As more user profiles, groups and pages get created each day, Facebook as an ecosystem grows exponentially with even more chances for content to become overwhelming for its users. The company, naturally, isn’t interested in losing its users and customers, so it has been making significant changes these past years with how the content is distributed and has been adding various tools to help each user manage their news feeds. Whether it’s fighting against spread of fake news articles or just general spam, the company seems to be on the right track in creating better user experience. Originally, users had an option to get less updates from the selected user or a page, but ultimately the function was scrapped and replaced with an option to unfollow other Facebook user and thus letting users completely avoid getting updates from that entity on their news feeds without losing connection to a friend or a group. And that is on top of the existing algorithm that adjusts the frequency of posts based on the user’s actions towards posts that appear in their timelines.
Just like several other recently announced features, Snooze is slowly rolling out for Facebook users in the U.S. and, afterwards, it’s expected to become a standard feature of its website and app. The company has yet to reveal when exactly that might happen and whether the feature will give users more control over the length of Snooze instead of just three predetermined values.
