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Comment by pluckingdaisies | Hacker News Reader

[throwaway for obvious reasons]

As one of the people who initiated the hidden likes test on Instagram, I can confidently and authoritatively say you're incorrect. There was no ill intent. It was solely to see if we could make people feel less self conscious by decreasing social comparison. Our hope was to decrease the pressure normal people feel about sharing their lives with their friends and family. We thought this might improve some long-term metrics, but once we discussed the rationale for the test with leadership, the well-being opportunity trumped any impact on metrics--positive or negative.

Also, we [IG] did this first, and we started it for the right reasons. Blue followed our lead. Believe it or not, there are people who give a shit about well-being at FB.

[edited because jazzy was right that I was too harsh]

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Just because you protect your own identity doesn’t save you from reflecting poorly on your employer - O.P. only said they suspected it was the case, no need to call them full of shit

Besides, even if it was proposed with good intentions there could have been other, aligned agendas that helped it make it into the product

Reddit has been fuzzing scores for years to trip up bots, it’s a good strategy, prevents your enemy from having accurate information. [1]

Also demetricating was conceived 7 years ago (!) by Ben Grosser [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/eaqnf/pardon_me_but_50... [2] https://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/

[edit Thanks for the edit]

Re demetricating: I've only been on HN for a few years, so I don't know much about its UI's history. But since it's also partially demetricated (not showing votes on comments except for your own posts), could it be considered an earlier example of demetrication?

I'd agree HN is an example of demetrification. I would add a caveat though: HN's opaque rules about rankings, flagging, when to silently ignore votes, etc would drive me crazy if I didn't trust that the people running it genuinely want a good community for hackers. Give Facebook the same power, and I'd assume such powers would be used for nefarious purposes, and I'd find myself (rightly or wrongly) calling half the posts in my feed part of some sort of conspiracy.

> Believe it or not, there are people who give a shit about well-being at FB.

This is undoubtedly true of most maligned corporations out there, they are enabled by many well-intentioned people, but the physics of the situation remain. If something makes a meaningful dint to the bottom line (in a way that can't be offset by intangibles like public-relations wins etc.), someone at a higher-level is likely to veto it. This is where organized labor can be a force for good by facilitating internal protest.

Not sure why your comment is so aggressive and defensive. OP acknowledged they were being conspiratorial.

Also there might not be any explcit intent for your team to impelemt the above but sometimes these things emerge as slow influence that comes from the guiding hand of top level influence over time. A healthy dose of skepticism regarding social media is more than warranted, you can't be upset that anyone would be led to think that after the 2 decades of such decisions made by social media giants

And I think very few people or companies do things for a single reason. There is always a list of pros and cons.

>Not sure why your comment is so aggressive and defensive.

Especially given Facebook's atrocious track record

I'd like to see your original comment.

I don't presume to know the full story of how this feature came to be inside your company, I'm assuming from your comment that this initiative was created organically by employees for noble reasons. Do you admit the possibility that management may have had different motivations to agree to this idea? There's no reason why both of us can't be correct. You might have your own incentive behind this idea, management might have another.

>Believe it or not, there are people who give a shit about well-being at FB.

Under the assumption that you place yourself among them, I'd suggest not writing "you are full of shit" when you disagree with what someone wrote. They simply stated that it was their suspicion, and went so far as to highlight that it may sound conspiratorial.

edit: comment has been edited - appreciated

Yep. You're totally right. Which is why I edited my comment.

>Our hope was to decrease the pressure normal people feel about sharing their lives with their friends and family.

My question is: do you honestly think that people should share their private lives with their friends and family through a public, global platform owned by a giant corporation? Maybe that's part of the problem.

Social media is either private or public according to how you choose to make it.

You can have your IG posts set to private and only those who follows you see them. You just have to make sure those you accept their follow request are people you want to share with.

Same for Facebook. One can't have 5,000 Facebook friends and worry about their content being public when you chose to accept friend requests from thousands of people you don't know.

For a very very long time, my Twitter feed was my private journal for things I didn't want to forget because my account was private and wouldn't accept follow request from anyone while I'm able to follow accounts that interests me.

This isn't Facebook's problem as far as I can tell.

Is it really impossible you and your team were mislead into thinking that hiding likes was for the wellbeing of the user? You may not have had ulterior motives but someone higher up may have.

Trust is the opposite of weight loss - easier lost than gained.

While I trust and respect your stance, you may have been just a "useful idiot" in this.

It'd be a good thing, if it's left to stand. You _should_ be happy/proud about _that_. But I'd not waste my life going out of my way to advocate for the rationale behind it.

Company behavior is an emergent phenomenon. It doesn't need to correspond to the will of the individual employees, specially not of those outside the chain of command.

Interesting phallacy.. a form of circular self-referencing argumentum ab auctoritate.

As a former sales rep for Yelp, I can relate to being on the inside of an operation that was accused of conspiracy when, in fact, no conspiracy existed. It's frustrating.

I don't agree with a LOT of what Facebook (and Instagram) does, but I also don't think everything they do is with the intent of evil.

You cited user engagement on the platform as a reason for taking that action. Is that any really different than the above conspiracy theory?

I know it's hard to shed the received narrative that FB = evil, and even if it was easy you probably wouldn't want to because it feels good and right to reinforce that belief.

However, I think I was pretty clear.

"It was solely to see if we could make people feel less self conscious by decreasing social comparison." - the main goal

"Our hope was to decrease the pressure normal people feel about sharing their lives with their friends and family." - if we achieve the main goal, this ~might~ happen.

"We thought this might improve some long-term metrics" - on the off chance this happens, we ~might~ benefit in the long run.

Is this really different from "I suspect that the recent trend of social media platforms hiding engagement metrics has less to do with fighting 'envy' than simply allowing for more authentic looking proliferation of promoted content" ?

I think so. Seems like a pretty indirect way of driving user engagement.

It's pretty funny how you imply I'm saying facebook is evil because it makes me feel good - pretty ridiculous statements in light of what I've actually said. I was just saying facebook is a business. It seems you have a lot to prove though. Sorry, I don't buy that "It was solely to see if we could make people feel less self conscious by decreasing social comparison" is the main goal. It seems like a pretty direct way of driving user engagement, seeing as you're literally removing an inhibitor of engagement.

>It's pretty funny how you imply I'm saying facebook is evil because it makes me feel good

Yup, I've found its a typical reaction from Facebook employees on this site to attack commenters and rationalize any time negative critiques are brought up, although the extreme defensiveness is pretty telling

This trail reminds me of the "are we the baddies" comedy routine.

It is difficult to predict how people react with limited information. I think hypothesis for this change was "well being might improve but we're not sure" and at the same time "engagement might drop because there might be folks out there who enjoy collecting likes and this makes it less fun but we're not sure". And it's hard to tell what the results will look like based purely on speculation.

I don't know what makes you certain you know the answers even though you've looked at none of the data. Do you have some other sources?

I said it SEEMS like a PRETTY direct way of promoting engagement. It really seems like you're trying to misrepresent what I actually said and may main point.

It might be better to allow people to make their own choices instead of forcing something on them. Your reasoning is going to be wrong or irrelevant for many.

> As one of the people who initiated the hidden likes test on Instagram, I can confidently and authoritatively say you're full of shit

As somebody who followed the stories about FB and it's practices in the recent years, I can confidently tell you that by now it is obvious that FB as a company is acting like a sociopathic entity. Even if the individuals working there believe they are doing good, the outcome as a whole always tend to look the opposite.

So even if GP is full of shit, it is way more believabe than what you are saying simply because fits the general narrative about FB - every single thing FB does is about exploiting pesonal data and human behaviour.

I don't believe any of this.

>Believe it or not, there are people who give a shit about well-being at FB.

If people really cared about the well being of others, they wouldn't work at Facebook. I'm sure the fat checks are nice though

With the parting comment in mind, that there are people who give a shit at FB, how do you/they reconcile putting a lot of effort into managing user envy, when we have a much bigger problem caused by FB, in that it is actively feeding a single perspective to each user to further entrench that viewpoint (with the objective of selling advertising) when it could achieve a lot more worldly good by providing alternate viewpoints. The practice of pushing more alt right to the alt rights, or more leftist content to liberals is strengthening tribalism and as a result doing far more damage to society than 'like envy' would ever do. Please don't see this as a challenge or an attack, I'm really curious to know how this sits with FB employees, climate change is threatening the planet but tribalism is threatening democracy and FB is feeding that monster.

Is the issue of anxiety and depression among Gen Z being brought to the center stage internally at FB? I’d feel a whole lot better about the company if I knew that an actual effort was being made to right some wrongs in it’s wake of addiction profiteering. The optimist in me sees this feature as a step in a more humane direction.

I feel sympathy for those who feel this envy but don't share it.

When I realised what this thing is, I realised it's a nothingburger for me.

Pity I can't control the monster instead of having some decisions, made in a remote conference room, that are no use to me, rammed down my throat.

Did you even consider an option to give people choice on that matter? Two choices actually: whether to share like count on their posts and to see it on others' posts.

If that happened then there will be no benefit of the initiative.

You have your feature turned on? Well that's because you're a big shot and you feel you'll get the likes to show it off.

You have your feature turned off? Well that's because you know you simply won't get any likes and we all know that. Now you're 'depressed'.

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