Facebook’s New ‘Quiet Mode’ Wants You to Spend More Time With Your Family

Nowadays, most of us are glued to our smartphones and spend hours without realizing it. Smartphone addiction is real, and big internet companies know this. Spending more time on smartphones scrolling through our timelines on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter has its own consequences. We are so addicted to smartphones that we ignore the people sitting right next to us, and decide to watch some random kid on the internet instead. Big giants like Google and Apple have taken many steps in the past to limit users’ smartphone usage and motivate them to focus on real-life like their family, friends, or their work. Both Digital ‘Wellbeing‘ on Android and ‘Screen Time‘ on iOS are both excellent OS-level applications to see how much time you are spending on each app and limit your app time. Many applications have also implemented this function to discourage people to spend more time on their apps and spend time in the real world.

Quiet mode interface

Facebook now joined the bandwagon by introducing a new ‘Quiet Mode‘ for its main Facebook app. The Quiet Mode aims to mute all the incoming push notifications for a specified period by the user. It is to help users to control how much time they spend on Facebook. Enabling Quiet Mode will mute most notifications, and if you try to open Facebook while you have Quiet Mode turned on, you will be reminded that you have set this time aside for other works. While introducing the Quiet Mode on the COVID-19 newsroom post, Facebook wrote:

“As we all adjust to new routines and staying home, setting boundaries for how you spend your time online can be helpful. Whether it’s to help you focus on your family and friends, sleep without distraction or manage how you spend your time at home, we have tools that can help you find the right balance for how you use Facebook. We added Quiet Mode, which mutes most push notifications, and if you try to open Facebook while in Quiet Mode, you’ll be reminded that you set this time aside to limit your time in the app.”

Scheduled-Quiet-Mode

You can manually enable the Quiet Mode from the Facebook app for a specified period, or you can set a schedule to turn it on for a specified period on a specific time. For example, if you are working from home in the wake of this Coronavirus epidemic, you can choose to turn on Quiet Mode every weekday from 9 AM to 5 PM.

The Quiet Mode is part of the “Your Time on Facebook” that tracks how much time you have spent on Facebook week-over-week to discourage you to spend more time.

Currently, the Quiet Mode is rolling for iPhone users, and it is expected to arrive on Android in May.

What is your opinion on this new update from Facebook? It is hard to imagine that Facebook wants us to spend less time on their platform even though their whole business model revolves around us spending more time on it. Anyway, this update won’t affect me much cause I rarely use Facebook. How about you? Do you use Facebook a lot? Let’s discuss this in the comment section.

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