The Gram Axes The ‘Following’ Tab

Noticed anything different about The Gram today? Really? What about those cheeky morning scrolls through the ‘Following’ tab, where you check to see if your recently-single friend has liked any of her ex’s photos? If she has, you send her a text to call her out. Yeah, that’s right. Every stalker’s favorite ‘Following’ tab is no more. But, is it more of an RIP or a “good riddance” moment?

Don’t lie, we know you know what it is… FINE, we’ll humor you. The ‘Following’ tab was a favorite for every social media stalker. It allowed us to see what the people we followed liked, AKA monitor their activity. Lost yet? Basically it allowed us to “keep tabs” on each other’s likes (my sister’s boyfriend’s personal favorite catch-phrase). 

So, what triggered the update? A spokesperson for Instagram and Head of Product, Vishal Shah told Buzzfeed News: “People didn’t always know that their activity is surfacing. So you have a case where it’s not serving the use case you built it for, but it’s also causing people to be surprised when their activity is showing up.” Um, yeah. We could have totally used a reminder that people could see us liking Bieber’s posts from 2012 a few weeks back. Not our finest hour.

If you ask us, our world is already ‘Big-Brother’ enough. If the removal of the ‘Following’ tab gives us the freedom to go on a liking-spree without broadcasting it to our followers, we’re all for this new Insta update. Here’s to liking posts in perfect anonymity. Well, maybe not perfect anonymity but hey; we’ll take what we can get.


Up next, ‘Sadfishing’ The New Coping Mechanism For Social Media Users