Instagram to test hiding like counts in the US

Hiding in coffins?

For many Instagram users, this is an eerily accurate description of their relationship with the site.

I thought it meant Instagram was going to hide those blood-sucking lurkers in dark spaces that are alike.

same. how do counts usually hide themselves?

Yeah, coulda used at least a hyphen on like-counts. I had to read the headline twice to parse it.

I vant to heart your pooost!

But just as a test ... because they'll never know if they never try.

I really wish Instagram had a proper "share" feature. The current state of sharing is these idiotic feature accounts stealing work from artists without paying them, reposting them with almost zero credit to the artist (they typically hide the artist credit under rows of single "." or "---" so that the credits are pushed down beyond the "..." button), and Instagram promoting the feature account's post to peoples' discover pages instead of the original artist's post, resulting in tte artist getting very little exposure. It would be much better if it presented itself as:

Artist's name [Follow button]

reposted by (feature account name)

[picture]

I wonder how the young adults who've grown up with this cope. If you're a standard issue 25 year old, Instagram and FB has probably been with you your whole life (the part where you meet people other than family), with likes and hearts replacing your feeling of self-worth...

I think my last post on Instagram is from like 2 years back if not more. My recent posts are all my wife tagging me on different events.

>When you post something you get that happy feeling seeing the like count of it, it makes you feel good and then you keep checking on it regularly which is a problem, and why I don't post anymore.

I stopped using Instagram altogether because of the above dopamine effect. Not in myself - I rarely posted anyway - but watching its effect on close friends has been somewhat dismaying.

This is old school stuff. Modern like handling is around who replies to your stories.

I think it's primal brain stuff: "Everyone else is liking this post, therefore I must to fit in." I really think it's as simple as that.

I suspect this is move to nudge the marketing dollars that go directly to influencers to reroute into FB's purse.

If you take away the primary signal for effectiveness, marketers are probably going to lose interest.

I doubt they'll hide likes from their users, though. It's essentially a neural network training free workers to optimize their posts so FB can get as much attention and dollars as possible. You stop the likes, you stop the training.

I am the same but most people seem to prefer to follow the herd.

I think it's very simple, when like counts are hidden to yourself and others, the impact of your individual like is reduced, and so it's less rewarding to do.

Or People actually like things after the social proof from people they recognize

Instagram shows you if a couple of your own followers also liked something

It also shows you things your followers are interested in

Not knowing they liked something reduces social proof

I must be a miser of likes. More than ~120 and I think, “no one needs this much adulation.”

> I use my IG for promoting my music and need to know how well each post is doing ... There’s literally no point for me otherwise.

(assuming your comment wasn't sarcastic - maybe it was?)

I've never understood this. Shouldn't the metric for how well a promotional post performs be... actual sales (or at the very least, traffic to whatever you're promoting)?

Granted, likes might be a useful proxy metric for (roughly) gauging interest in something, but are you really making important business decisions based on a post's likes? What are you comparing those numbers to, and how do you know what they mean in terms of real business impact? How do you know people are responding to the product, and not just the model (or "influencer") you happened to use in your promotional image?

Think about it this way - what if you post something you know is well made and people will like, but it might take some time to gain some traction?

If you have a post sitting there with only a handful of likes, that might prevent potential fans from even checking out your post, simply because it didn't receive a ton of likes very quickly.

A private like count that only the original poster can see would better, right? Removing the public count by itself seems like a pretty reasonable and fair way to handle that scenario. It at least prevents some of the worst ways low quality content games the system via purchased likes, bot accounts, etc.

Another way to put it - if it's actually popular, that would hopefully show via the content's own merits, and Kardashian-style tactics won't work as well.

Creators can still see the likes.

I doubt they would get rid of this, however if they do a cynical take would be that it will boost advertising dollars. As you need to pay to see any metrics.

>users click like on almost every post they scroll as kind of acknowledgement that they've seen it

This is how my father in Indiana uses Facebook... haha

> It will become far less “curated perfect photos” and instead be more slices of everyone’s life.

It's just this, and for one simple reason:

This is snapchat's area of success, and Facebook is doing whatever it can to cut into it. Stories in _literally_ every app they own is as good an indication as any.

Disclosure: I'm speculatively long on snap

There is some truth to it. I know several people who delete posts if they do not reach a specific level of likes within a given amount of time.

> This isn’t a business decision any reasonable company would make on those grounds alone

Agreed. The decision is not because they care about people's well-being (otherwise they would kill off their entire product to begin with, or make more drastic changes that actually matter).

The decision is because they want people to believe they care, as the parent company is under a lot of negative press lately.

I think it's a very reasonable decision. Instagram's claim to to fame is the quality of its content.

But if everyone’s feeds are custom curated, how do users know which posts have the highest feed position?

This brings up a good point:

If you remove likes, now Instagram can truly manipulate your feeds in any way they want (obviously if you want to scroll through how many people liked posts, that's one way to get around it, but very laborious).

Have no idea what your point it. You’re suggesting this is a backend change, meaning that Facebook is going to stop tracking like count, but all they are doing is hiding it in the app. Users can still see their own like count.

> That's the same that FB does with each of their properties. they limit reach so you have to pay.

Yep. Like Reddit, Facebook and Instagram are astroturfing and advertising platforms. This is how they do business.