Twitter Snooze mutes notifications for a social media detox
At some point, all of us need a break from social media. While some of us are good at closing an app like Twitter or Facebook and leaving it alone for a while, others are quickly pulled back in by push notifications. Twitter seems to be testing a solution to that problem, allowing users to silence push notifications for a set period of time.
By turning that feature on, you're essentially setting a quiet period for the app where it won't bug you with notifications about retweets, mentions, or follows. Jane Manchun Wong discovered this new feature lurking in Twitter's code, and was able to take it for a spin herself. In addition to posting screenshots of the feature in action on her Twitter account, she also wrote about it on her blog.
Twitter is testing Snooze feature, allowing users to pause notifications for 1 hour, 3 hours or 12 hours!
I wrote a blog for the first look of this unreleased feature https://t.co/EoNYaRHraQ
Tip @Techmeme pic.twitter.com/qm3aMM2Q00
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 6, 2019
Snooze, as the feature is called, seems pretty straightforward in its implementation. When you're viewing the notifications tab in-app, you'll see a little bell icon with a slash through it at the top. Tapping that icon will bring up the Snooze panel, where you can silence push notifications for 1 hour, 3 hours, or 12 hours.
So, if you're about to step into a meeting where you don't want to be disrupted, you can silence your notifications for an hour and have them turn on again automatically when that hour is up. If, on the other hand, you need to leave social media alone for a while, you can silence notifications for longer. As Wong points out, this could also be a good tool for people who have tweets go viral and don't want to deal with the constant stream of notifications they receive as a result.
The notifications you receive while you've got them turned off will be kept in your notifications tab, so you'll be able to look through them once your quiet time is up. So far, Twitter hasn't said anything about this test, so we don't know how many people are seeing it. We also don't when – or even if – this feature will roll out to the broader Twitter user base, so we'll keep an eye out for more.