INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook today is launching a new feature called &Quiet Mode& that will allow you to minimize distractions by muting the app push
notifications for a time frame you specify
The company announced the change as an update on its COVID Newsroom post, describing it as a way for users to set boundaries around how they
spend their time on Facebook as they adjust to new routines and to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Facebook,
you can either turn on or off Quiet Mode as needed or you can schedule to it run automatically at designated times
For example, if you work from home from 9 AM to 5 PM, you could set Quiet Mode to automatically run during your workday to reduce your
temptation to waste time in the app.
If you try to launch Facebook during Quiet Mode, the app will remind you that you&ve set this time
aside with the goal of limiting your time in the app, the company explains.
The controls for Quiet Mode will be found in a new section on
Facebook where you can view other data about your time spent on Facebook platform
Here, you&ll be able to browse charts that show you the time you&ve spent on Facebook on a daily basis, a comparison of your daytime versus
nighttime use, and another chart that lets you see how many times you opened the Facebook app each day.
Facebook introduced its first ''time
spent& charts back in 2018, but their appearance has changed to better match the style of this new &Your Time on Facebook& section, rolling
Facebook has also now added more analysis, including new week-over-week trends, the time of day charges, and the chart displaying the number
of visits.
In addition, this section will include an option to enable a weekly report that will let you know how you&re managing your time
It will also link to the Activity Log of your own interactions across Facebook, including your reactions, comments and posts
And it will link out to other features that were previously buried in the Settings, including your News Feed Preferences and Notification
Settings.
The former is where you designate which people you see first on your News Feed, which to Snooze, which to Unfollow and so on
The Notification Settings section, meanwhile, lets you turn on or off the push notifications and emails for specific updates from Facebook,
like new comments, friend requests, tags, birthdays and more.
These aren''t new features, but they&ve been relocated here to make the new
section more of a one-stop-shop for managing your time on Facebook.
Today changes are the latest in a series of efforts Facebook has made in
recent years focused on users& &digital well-being.
The digital well-being movement pushes forward the idea that our smartphones and
applications weren''t built with the mental health needs of their users in mind, but were rather designed to maximize the time we spend
Users, having become aware of the addictiveness of our mobile devices, began to feel more negatively about screen time and their
time-wasting apps.
Fearing backlash, tech companies — including Facebook, as well as the OS makers, Google and Apple — introduced more
digital well-being features into their platforms
This includes the now built-in screen time controls that allow users to track and limit their time spent on phones and even the time spent
in individual apps, like Facebook.
One iOS feature, in particular, may have posed a particular threat to Facebook: a new option introduced
in iOS 12 that allowed users to more easily turn off app notifications right from the push notification itself
Apple even demoed how this could be used to silence Facebook notifications easily — an effort to redirect this growing negative user
sentiment to specific apps on its iOS platform, rather than toward the platform that allowed apps to spam users with alerts in the first
place.
Facebook response to this iOS feature, belatedly, is today launch of Quiet Mode
Instead of having its app notifications turned off entirely from the home screen of an iPhone, the option gives Facebook users more nuanced
But it also means that Facebook retains permission to push its notifications during the hours Quiet Mode doesn''t run.
Facebook is testing
a new &Your Time on Facebook
adding:
Quiet Mode for a specific amount of time& Scheduled Quiet Mode
Facebook told me (via @alexvoica) that
they&ve been testing it for a few months and will continue to test and iterate pic.twitter.com/7sPDuP4mrL
mdash; Jane Manchun Wong
(@wongmjane) March 16, 2020
Facebook confirms Quiet Mode was in testing with a small percentage of Facebook users prior to today launch
It the same feature that reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong had spotted in March, in fact.
The feature is now rolling out to more people
globally on iOS and will continue to do so over the next month or so, Facebook says
The rollout on Android will begin with testing in May and a broader release in June.
