You can now violently shake your phone to report Instagram problems

Instagram

Meta-owned Instagram is probably one of the worst social networks in existence right now, as it (along with Meta’s other social network, Facebook) has faced scandal after scandal over the past few months. Even though the company isn’t doing much to address the countless mental health and misinformation campaigns ravaging the platform, there is a new feature that is pretty funny.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a video on Wednesday (via The Verge) that highlights two new features. First, the iOS app (and soon the Android version) now has the ability to remove individual photos from a carousel. Second, and definitely funnier, is a new ‘Rage Shake’ function coming to both iOS and Android. When you shake your phone, Instagram opens a dialog with a button for reporting problems with the app. You can also turn off Rage Shake from the same dialog, in case you accidentally activate it too often.

It’s always fun when mobile apps or operating systems add functionality for shaking the device, though the practice isn’t too common — likely because it’s not discovered until someone actually shakes their phone. iPhones can undo the most recent text action by shaking the phone, but because that gesture isn’t loved by everyone, Apple introduced another activation method with the release of iOS 13 in 2019.

In other Instagram news, Meta announced today that the standalone Instagram messaging app Threads is shutting down. The app was seemingly inspired by separation of the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps, but Threads mainly focused on camera content. Threads never received widespread adoption — the Android app has been around since 2019 and has under 10 million installs, compared to over 1 billion installs for the main Instagram application