Tell me if it happened to you: Suddenly, in the dead of night, some friend seems to shut up on Instagram. He doesn’t answer anything else and only resumes the conversation the next day. Already? If so, know that you may be yet another victim of a quiet revolution taking place on the Mark Zuckerberg-controlled app.
Few people realized that the platform has adopted a new way to control notifications of conversations. The so-called silent mode has been known since January and gained a global expansion in June, as people from Instagram itself told me. There are months of tool available to all, but there are still those who wonder at its presence.
A lot of between contacts
With me there were several episodes in which the Insta contacts asked me the famous “what happened?” after seeing a thought-provoking warning in the middle of the conversation. It goes like this: “[so-and-so] hasn’t received a notification about this message because he’s in silent mode.”
Usually we are in a bad light until we explain that it is a native tool. Take a look at people’s reactions…
And most importantly, some contacts were under the impression that it is possible to choose to whom the warning will appear silently. As if it were a do not disturb for specific contacts within Insta. Quite the opposite! Note that silent mode makes no distinction between your friends on Mark Zuckerberg’s network.
The Instagram team explained to me that the default setting causes the app to go into silent mode from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. the next day. Just enter the app settings to modify the schedules. In addition, a summary is displayed with the notifications or messages received while the feature was enabled.
Believe it or not, the warning that the person won’t receive notifications divides opinions. There are those who think that the ideal would be to say nothing about it, and leave the other without knowing that the friend may be spoiling at that very moment.
Fact is, similar features are welcome on our smartphones, computers, and other electronic devices. The flurry of whistles, notifications, alerts and messages throughout the day has become untenable – at least for part of us. Receiving a hand from a platform that carries the discourse of thinking about mental health counts for a lot at this time.
Don’t like it? Just turn it off.