Instagram is reportedly getting rid of the feature that let you see what everyone else was liking
- Instagram is discontinuing its Following Activity tab, a feature that let people easily see which posts their friends and coworkers were liking on the platform, according to a report from BuzzFeed News.
- The feature wasn't used frequently by most people, Vishal Shah, Instagram's head of product, told Buzzfeed News.
- An Instagram update that discontinues the feature will reportedly roll out later this week.
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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, according to a report from BuzzFeed News' Katie Notopoulos.
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 vanish from the app with an update later this week, Vishal Shah, Instagram's head of product, told Buzzfeed News.
Shah said that the tab was rarely clicked on by the average Instagram user, adding that the platform is removing the feature in order to present a more simplistic interface. When people did find out about the Following Activity tab, Shah said, they were surprised and unnerved.
"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."
Instagram did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the change.
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.