In a move that is likely to impact how much time users spend on social medi sites, social media tech giant Instagram has quietly removed the ability for its users to limit their daily usage of the app to less than 30 minutes. This comes after the company had previously supported a user-defined limit for Instagram that could be as low as 15 minutes, or even 10 minutes per day. The social media tech giant was “making a big PR push to suggest that more ‘mindful’ usage of its services was possible, as concern over social media addiction surged,” as per a Tech Crunch report.
According to the Mac Rumours, following the latest app update, the ‘Set daily time limit’ menu card pops up and prompts users to choose how long that should be, with a new minimum of 30 minutes, while the radio button next to the maximum of three hours is pre-selected in the menu card as if to nudge users to choose that limit.
In 2018, Instagram had introduced options in the app to set a daily time limit, with a reminder to be sent when that time limit is reached – useful for those who want to cut down on their social media usage. The users were able to select a time limit as low as ten or even five minutes a day, but selecting such short durations is no longer possible. The popup does say the user can keep their existing limit if they wish, but an additional popup on the activity page in the app says the 10-minute value is “no longer supported.” So, after the update, users will find the new limits available are now 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour, two hours, and three hours.
The change comes just a few months after Instagram introduced its ‘Take a Break’ feature that lets users opt-in to receive periodic reminders if they’ve been on the app for long stretches of time. The change follows disappointing quarterly earnings reported by Meta earlier this month, which saw the company slash its guidance for the first quarter of 2022 by USD 30 billion.
The Mac Rumours report further noted, Meta partly blamed its weaker performance on steps taken by Apple to improve user privacy by making it harder for platforms and apps to track users across other apps and websites for ad targeting purposes, which Meta said will cost its business USD 10 billion this year.
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