Starting this week, it will be harder to stalk people’s activity on Instagram.
Instagram is discontinuing a feature called Following Activity that showed people’s likes, comments, and follows in a separate tab, BuzzFeed News’ Katie Notopoulos first reported.
The Following Activity tab on Instagram showed users which posts their friends were liking, and could previously be accessed by clicking on the heart icon on the app’s bottom menu bar. The tab will be removed with an update that will begin rolling out on Monday, an Instagram spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.
The tab was rarely clicked on by the average Instagram user, the spokesperson said, adding that the platform is removing the feature in order to present a more simplistic interface.
“We are removing it becasue only a small number of people use the Following tab regularly. Additionally, we’ve heard from people that they think the Following tab is a very hidden feature that they don’t find to be very useful, especially when compared to a similar feature like Explore,” the spokesperson said.
When people did find out about the Following Activity tab, they were surprised and unnerved, Instagram’s head of product Vishal Shah said in an interview with Buzzfeed News.
“People didn’t always know that their activity is surfacing,” Shah told Buzzfeed News. “So you have a case where it’s not serving the use case you built it for, but it’s also causing people to be surprised when their activity is showing up.”
The app has seemingly already begun removing the feature for test groups of users, which some Twitter and Reddit users noted as early as September.
Meanwhile, Instagram is rolling out new features in other realms. Its separate messaging app, Threads, which mimics Snapchat’s format of quick image-based messaging, launched last week.
Source:
BusinessInsider