Can you use Snapchat’s Do Not Disturb for One Person or Account?

Snapchat added Do Not Disturb last year and it went down very well with certain users. It provides the ability to silence friends without letting them know and offers the tool we all wanted for certain members of our social groups. So can you use Snapchat’s Do Not Disturb for one person or is it a general setting? How can you tweak Snapchat so it’s nicer to use if you have annoying friends? Read on to find out!

The Snapchat of today bears very little resemblance to the app that first launched all those years ago. It has steadily evolved, both due to feedback from users and the company’s own ideas. I think today’s Snapchat is far better than that early version even if we still don’t have all the features we want.

Do Not Disturb was a long awaited answer to the question of friends who overshare or who won’t shut up. It’s the middle ground between putting up with the noise on Snapchat or unfriending and dealing with all the social fallout that unfriending brings with it.

Snapchat Do Not Disturb

In answer to the original question, you can use Snapchat’s Do Not Disturb for one person or for group chats. Setting it is simple too.

1. Enter a chat in Snapchat.
2. Select the individual or group you want to silence.
3. Hold down their name until the popup menu appears.
4. Select Do Not Disturb.

You will still be able to follow the chat and access it as normal but you will no longer receive notifications from the individual or group you silenced. They won’t be notified and as far as they are concerned, it’s business as usual.

Do Not Disturb vs. Mute

So we know that Do Not Disturb stops you receiving notifications from specific users or groups in Snapchat. But what about the Mute function. How is it different?

Mute works in a different way to DND in that it moves a Story out of view rather than suppressing notifications. For example, if you have a friend who is constantly posting lame Stories you don’t want to read, you can mute them and they will be sent to the back of your Stories queue.

They will still be in the queue but won’t open automatically like the others and you will have to manually select them to see them. Like Do Not Disturb, the user is not notified and they don’t know that you have muted them. They will possibly notice that you don’t view their stories much if they check their stats but otherwise will remain ignorant of the situation.

To mute someone, do this:

1. Open your friend list within Snapchat.
2. Select their profile and then Settings.
3. Select Mute Story.
4. Confirm your choice.

As you will see, you can also set Do Not Disturb this way as well as from within a chat.

Both tools allow you to remain friends with the person, to contact each other, engage in chat, swap Snaps and all the usual stuff but you get to control what you see a little more. These are very useful tools in managing social media and are underrated as far as I can tell.

The one thing to remember is that both Do Not Disturb and Mute are set and forget. There is no timer or time limit. If you want to begin hearing from the person or group or want to see their Stories again, you will need to manually select them and undo the settings.

Using Do Not Disturb to avoid conflict

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past decade, you will know that social media is now a huge part of our everyday lives and has far reaching influence over how we live. What could easily be dismissed as ‘just an app’ is so much more than that for some people.

There are now areas of science and psychology dedicated to understanding the effects of social media on our lives. One area of study is how we handle rejection or conflict on social media. The short answer is usually not well. Anything we can do to avoid conflict on social media is a good thing, even if you’re not afraid of a little conflict in your life. People act differently online and someone who wouldn’t usually bat an eyelid at a personal or verbal rebuke can react very differently on social media. That’s one of the reasons Snapchat introduced the Do Not Disturb and Mute tools. So users can remain within the app and manage their lives without having conflict.

Do you use Do Not Disturb in Snapchat? Use Mute? Have any stories about these two features? Tell us about them below if you do!