Anti-social Media

Instagram’s latest feature will help you figure out who to unfollow

It’s a win for both users and Instagram.

Today Instagram is launching a new feature to more easily manage who you’re following. The improved follower view makes it easier than ever before to clean up your feed and weed out people you know from high school.

Following Categories — The feature, which can be accessed by tapping “Following” on your profile, splits your followers into a few categories, including “Least Interacted With” and “Most Shown in Feed.” The categories use data from your Instagram activity for the last 90 days.

You can also sort your followers by the date you followed their account, either from earliest to latest or vice versa.

Unclog your digital life — One of the longest-running frustrations of using social media is the time it takes to unfollow accounts. Interests and friends change very quickly, but social media doesn’t often take that into account in its mechanisms. Once you’ve been on social media for more than a few years, it becomes increasingly cumbersome to go through your Following list and make changes.

The new feature will also be useful in finding those accounts that might be clogging up your feed with multiple posts per day. No one has time for that.

Good for Instagram, too — This feature immediately puts Instagram ahead of other social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok by giving users more deft control over who they’re following. Users are much more likely to continue using the platform if they’re not greeted by a feed that feels stale or unwelcoming. And that means they’ll keep using the platform indefinitely into the future. That will keep both users and Instagram happy.