Facebook and Instagram add activity trackers to help you limit your time on social media | Social

Instagram and Facebook are encouraging users to think more carefully about how much time they’re spending on both apps — by using new tools within Instagram and Facebook.

Today, Facebook announced that it is adding new ‘activity dashboards’ to the main Facebook app, and Instagram. The company said the dashboards are “coming soon,” but didn’t say what date exactly.

On both apps, the new dashboards will live within the ‘settings’ tab — on Instagram, it will be called ‘Your Activity,’ and on Facebook, it will be called ‘Your Time on Facebook.’ There, users can see the average amount of time they spent on Facebook or Instagram that week, as well as how much time they spent on their apps that day. They can also opt to receive a reminder after they’ve been on Facebook or Instagram for a certain amount of time — say 45 minutes — in the hopes that it will encourage them to log off for the day. And, they’ll be able to set mute push notifications for a set amount of time.

Really, by adding activity dashboards, Facebook and Instagram area really just keeping up with the times. Both Android P and iOS 12 will come with enhanced “do not disturb” and ‘time well spent’ features where they can view how much time they’re spending on certain apps. So Facebook and Instagram might as well encourage users to check the amount of time they spend on those apps within their apps, not on Android’s and iOS’ dashboards.

Placing these dashboards within the settings tab — and not within the main News Feed — likely will cut down on the number of users who actually use it. Additionally, it appears that the onus is on the user to determine what they want to set as their ‘daily limit.’ The tool would be more powerful if it encouraged them to set a specific daily limit, or showed them which parts of app they spend the most time in and sent suggestions on where users can cut back. But while that would be good for the company’s ‘Time Well Spent’ initiative, it wouldn’t be good for the company’s ad revenue, which depends on more eyeballs in more parts of the app.

Other tools that the company has added this year to help users feel like the amount of time they’re spending on social media is healthy include a ‘Keyword Snooze’ on Facebook so you can hide certain words from your News Feed for 30 days, and a ‘You’re all Caught Up’ feature to Instagram News Feed to alert you when you’ve scrolled through all the posts that have been added since last opening the app.