5 Features You Didn’t Know Were Coming To Instagram

Following the recent news of a user friendly way to report the well being of others and spreading positivity, Instagram is furthering their mission with its latest update. Aside from the self empowerment features, there’s also a new way to get rid of an unwanted family member in your followers without them even knowing! (I’ll get to that one in a minute). Here’s what you need to know about Instagram’s newest features:

1. Comment Liking

Similar to Facebook, you can now click that “like” button, only it’s in the shape of a little heart. Thus saving you from having to reply “thanks” to every friend that comments on your latest selfie, in fear your hopeful bae won’t see all the wonderful things they say about you. Instagram is hoping by implementing this feature that it will prompt people to spread some love.

2. Turning Off Commenting

All thanks to a wonderful little button you can turn away people from leaving you embarrassing or nasty comments on your pictures! To do this, all you have to do is go into ‘Advanced Settings’ and voila, your picture will speak for itself. The beauty of this is that it limits the options of cyber bullying! Don’t worry, you can always turn it off, or just limit blocking comments on one particular picture.

3. Screenshot Notifications

Although this is a slightly outdated feature (it became available in late November), many people are extremely confused by this! Before you have a social media induced panic attack and feel the need to throw yourselves down the stairs for screenshotting your crushes latest post; let’s clear the air. Someone will only be notified you screenshotted them when you take a screenshot of a disappearing message or a message you send through direct messages. So be careful what you slide into someone’s DM, because we all know what goes down in the DM’s

4. Follower Removal

Those who have public accounts will truly appreciate this feature, because it gives you more control over who follows you. If someone you don’t like wants to follow you but you don’t want to feel bad for blocking them, press the “…” next to their name and the option will come up to have them unfollow you. The best part is they won’t know they’re not following you or that you removed them in a nice way! Helps keep the creeps away from you, and saves your reputation at Christmas dinner with the family!

5. Coming Soon: Live Video Updates

This hasn’t officially begun yet, but we can expect live video messages to come within the next month or so. Think of Periscope or whatever you do on Facebook. Not many details have been released yet as to what exactly this will look like and how accessible this will be, but it is pretty cool that they’re making an advancement over their competitors.

The popular app’s efforts to promote positivity is being well noticed by the public. Although they are mimicking features from Facebook and Snapchat, they are continuing to pave the way for safe social media usage. Their ideas may seem recycled but the innovation is so nice and refreshing.

Almost all of my Instagram dreams have come true this year… And these only help end my list. If only they could make the ability to block people from seeing certain pictures, you know, like a privacy option for each picture.

The new update should be available as of next Monday, if not earlier.

Featured image via Pixabay