Facebook is undoubtedly an online social media behemoth, with millions of users using it every day to communicate with their friends and family. But with so many people using the platform, you might face a lot of issues too.
For one, news feeds are littered with nonsensical content every day that you have to sort through in order to find something interesting or relevant. All of this can get quite frustrating.
But Facebook is getting ready to offer their solution to this problem. Facebook is testing a new “Snooze” button, which will allow you to temporarily mute any person in your friends list. This option will be available to fit different durations, such as 24 hours, a week or even a month.
How is the Snooze Option Different from the Unfollow Option?
This “Snooze” feature, however, isn’t entirely new as a concept. Facebook had released a similar feature to thin the large number of notifications in 2014, with the “Unfollow” button. It allowed a user to completely banish a friend, group or a page from their news feed.
With this option, an upgrade from Facebook’s previous “See Less” feature, you would technically be friends and/or be a part of the group/page, but you would no longer receive any notifications from them. If you no longer want to have a person or a group attached to your online profile, then you have to unfriend them.
But the “Unfollow” option wasn’t fully satisfactory, because a lot of things can change over the course of time. Sometimes you might feel the need to shut down a large chunk of the notifications you receive in your news feed every day. After all, having a lot of friends can get quite overwhelming when you start to receive hundreds of notifications daily, pertaining to every single action your friends might make online.
But if you completely eliminate notifications permanently, you might miss out on something great when it pops up. Perhaps you miss the first picture of your friend’s baby or an accomplishment achieved by a friend. You might have felt the need to reduce the number of notifications earlier, but you might also miss important news if you do so as well.
The “Snooze” feature in Facebook will achieve a better result because now you can mute people on a temporary basis. When you mute a person or a group, you will no longer receive any notifications from them in your news feed for the duration of the mute. You can set the snooze option for 8 hours, 7 days, 30 days or more, depending on your needs.
This way, you can customize different durations for different people, groups or pages.
What is the Need for the Snooze Option?
You might certainly love your friends on Facebook, but sometimes they can start obsessively posting about random things which hold no interest to you. So every time they post something regarding the same subject, you get a notification or it shows up in your news feed. Some people post more than hundred times a day, and all this can get very old very fast.
The Facebook “Snooze” option can help you alleviate that problem by just temporarily muting that person so you can start getting notifications again after their posting phase is over.
This feature is also quite good for Facebook groups and pages. Most groups and pages have a very difficult time retaining users because they have to strike a very delicate balance between being relatively active and being so active that people get tired of all the notifications. When groups or pages fall into the latter category, people just quit them.
But with this new feature, users can temporarily stop receiving notifications without quitting the group or page permanently.
The “Snooze” option is currently in a testing phase, with some users already receiving access to it.
At Facebook, a developer can test a feature on a limited number of users to see if there any issues with it. This also allows them to get quality feedback from the users themselves, which they can then use to polish the feature before its official release.
If they find the feature to be helpful in solving the excess notifications issue, it will be implemented at a later stage.
