Instagram users will no longer have a dedicated place to view what their friends, family, enemies and favorite accounts are liking in real-time, as the app will officially be removing its “Following” tab this week. The feature currently lives inside Instagram’s heart icon along with the “You” section, which displays your personal feed updates. Once these changes go into effect, however, only your personal feed will be displayed.
The Following feature was one of the first features introduced to Instagram back in 2011, but Instagram is finding that many people are turning to its more recent “Explore” page to find new accounts to follow and interact with. Now, the Following tab is best known as the easiest way to keep track of a different user’s like and follow activity, thus making it a conflict in many relationships.
Along those same lines, Instagram’s head of product Vishal Shah confirmed in an initial report to BuzzFeed News that the reason for getting rid of the feature is because many people weren’t aware it existed in the first place. “People didn’t always know that their activity is surfacing. So you have a case where it’s not serving the use case you built if for, but it’s also causing people to be surprised when their activity is showing up,” they explained.
Instagram began testing a version of the app without the Following feature back in August, but every user can expect to see the feature removed sometime this week.
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