Dear god no.
Instagram has long been one of our favourite social media apps.
Quickfire snaps of food, nights out, sunsets. Boomerangs of glasses clinking. Heavily filtered stories that you can actually tag your mates in.
Just beautiful.
One of the other great things about Instagram is that it was never immediately clear whether someone followed you or not.
Sure, people on Instagram are obsessed with followers. Sure, it’s annoying when you want to know whether one specific person has unfollowed you and you need to go scrolling through account after account to find your name, but we’d become accustomed to that.
We liked not knowing exactly who did and didn’t follow us.
Things were easier that way.
Now, however, that’s all about to change.
Indy Tech has reported that the app is about to introduce a ‘follows you’ button right at the top of users’ profiles.
So once you click onto someone’s page, you’ll be able to see whether they follow you or not.
While this feature might seem similar enough to what Twitter has already got going on, there is a significant difference.
On Twitter you can see who does and doesn’t follow you… but you can also mute people, so you can tactfully avoid their content without having to let them know you absolutely do not want to see their tweets anymore.
Twitter’s mute feature eradicates any need for awkward “why’d you unfollow me?” call-outs at gaf parties and secondary school reunions.
Instagram’s update will, as far as we know, not give us this luxury.
But don’t worry, this isn’t the worst thing that the guys over at Insta are planning.
Instagram is testing "Follows You" feature on user profiles https://t.co/4AIDIHT3Zv pic.twitter.com/LBEoGJwUn1
— Matt Navarra (I quit X. Follow me on Threads) (@MattNavarra) September 20, 2017
Oh wow so now Instagram lets you know who actually follows you …loves this new update! So you can now lurking who's a fan lmao pic.twitter.com/suQ6NUp3ls
— Paris (not) Hilton (@ParisDuarte) September 16, 2017
Apparently, when you unfollow someone, that person will be alerted that you’ve done so.
Yep, just let that sink in a bit.
This report comes from Indy Tech too, and while they don’t go into detail about this exact feature, the very thought of it is enough to make us want to delete every social media app we have and go live in a cave.
We only hope that they mean users can go check whether they’ve been unfollowed, instead of actually receiving a notification about it… because that would be too harsh for us to handle.
The feature is currently being tested on Android users, but apparently, an iOS update is coming soon.
We’d rather live in denial, to be honest.
