Can You Unfollow Someone's Instagram Story Without Unfollowing Them Entirely? Not Really

Depending on where you stand in the social media sphere, the changes to Instagram on Tuesday are either good news or very bad news. If you are in the former party, and are still OK with the Instagram changes, but just don't want to see everyone's "stories" — know that it's hard to unfollow someone's Instagram story without unfollowing them entirely. Unfollowing a story and still getting access to the user's posts is not as easy as, say, on Facebook, where you can block an ongoing post or comment thread but still what's going on in a friend's life aside from that one post.

Instagram doesn't have any instructions on how to block a certain post and still keep up, so for now, it might be best to wait it out and deal with unwanted social action. Just because you never know when they'll post something better than the story you wanted to ditch earlier in the day.

These are what we call social media decisions. You can still block and unfollow people, just like always, but that's usually an extreme move. Unless it's a friend you really never see who, as I would say, abuses the system, and posts multiple stories in one day with various filters. No one needs to see that and they should be blocked, not unfollowed. Think about it. Do you need a 10th dog face filter in two days?

I think not. But it's totally right to have questions, because the new features sort of came out of nowhere. And when you start to judge your people for possibly overdoing it on the social network, know that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom doesn't see it that way. He told Tech Crunch that images are everything and bound to our very souls. "Do you meditate at all? One of the parts of meditation is actually being aware of your surroundings," Systrom said. "Sometimes taking a photo, looking down at it, editing it, adding a caption, whatever, actually makes you appreciate the moment that you’re in, it makes you stop and say, ‘That sunset is beautiful.’"

So maybe it's better to not unfollow anyone at all on Instagram, stories or not, and just take the post for what it is. A nice sunset, you can see secondhand. An attempt to view and experience life like Buddha, or a Peruvian shaman, and take every story and post for what it's worth and soak it in, Systrom-style. Or, just unfollow and block people that annoy you and leave it at that. If you don't like one post, what makes you think you're going to enjoy the next?