Instagram\u2019s Following tab, the activity feed that displays what posts your friends are liking, commenting on, and following, is going away this week. The company quietly removed the tab for some users starting in August, and Instagram confirmed to BuzzFeed News today that the feature will be phased out this week. Once the changes go into effect, the heart icon, which currently houses an activity feed for \u201cYou\u201d and \u201cFollowing,\u201d will only display your own activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Instagram\u2019s head of product Vishal Shah, the tab was removed for the sake of simplicity, and to cut down on a feature that most people didn\u2019t know existed. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t always know that their activity is surfacing. So you have a case where it\u2019s not serving the use case you built if for, but it\u2019s also causing people to be surprised when their activity is showing up,\u201d Shah told BuzzFeed News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s true that the Following tab has been a source of conflict for a lot of friendships and relationships. Who hasn\u2019t felt the heartbreak of waiting for someone to text you back, and going on Instagram only to discover that the person was busy liking photos of Jeff Goldblum? This is a change that\u2019s probably for the better.
The Verge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Instagram\u2019s Following tab, the activity feed that displays what posts your friends are liking, commenting on, and following, is going away this week. The company quietly removed the tab for some users starting in August, and Instagram confirmed to BuzzFeed News today that the feature will be phased out this week. Once the changes go …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12759"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12762,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12759\/revisions\/12762"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}