Facebook has added a new snooze button that lets you mute annoying friends, groups, and pages.
The feature lets you temporarily avoid content you don’t want to see — without having to unfriend or unfollow. No more baby pictures, Black Friday deals, or royal engagement stories.
Facebook has become the main source of news for a lot of people. As of August 2017, two-thirds of Americans said that they get at least some of their news from social media. But often times, our news feeds become cluttered with garbage that makes actual news hard to come by.
When one of your friends has a baby or buys a puppy. When there’s a big news story you have no interest in. When there’s a massive sale event and you already spent all your wages. They all fill our news feeds with posts we’d rather avoid.
Snooze users, groups, and pages
Now you can ignore all of that without hurting anyone’s feelings or unfollowing pages that you still want to see. Facebook’s new snooze button temporarily blocks people, groups, and pages for 30 days.
“We’ve heard from people that they want more options to determine what they see in News Feed and when they see it,” Facebook says. “With Snooze, you don’t have to unfollow or unfriend permanently, rather just stop seeing someone’s posts for a short period of time.”
The button gives us more control over the content that appears in our feeds. No one will ever know you have snoozed them so it can’t upset people. You’ll get a notification when the snooze period is about to end, and you can end it early if you wish.
The snooze button is available in the top-right drop-down menu of a post — in the same place you’d find the unfollow or block options. It started rolling out today, but it might take some time to reach all of Facebook’s 2 billion users.
