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Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

They’d already taken steps to make it harder to see - it already says ‘someone and others’ instead of ‘someone and 13 others’.

I immediately thought it was a glitch - or just an accidental poor UX.

If they got rid of like counts entirely I imagine people would start to leave the platform in hordes. I certainly wouldn’t use it. I use my IG for promoting my music and need to know how well each post is doing.

It removes the value proposition from the platform for me if I can’t tell how much people are engaging, or who. There’s literally no point for me otherwise.

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> 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?

Some people just make music to share it and don’t care about sales, you are aware of this? ;)

>> are you really making important business decisions based on a post's likes?

Yes and no, and only no because once again I don’t care about ‘selling’ my music. There’s no ‘business decisions.’

For God’s sake, my mixtape is FOSS on GitHub...like, the original project files. That’s how little I care about sales.

It’s very very easy to see what kinds of styles of music and singles people prefer over others, or what advertising techniques lead to more listens by analyzing who likes them. It’s super logical.

> It's very very easy to see what kinds of styles of music and singles people prefer over others, or what advertising techniques lead to more listens by analyzing who likes them. It’s super logical.

Sounds as though you're competing with an AI to make music for Instagrammers.

Which, now that I think about it, would make a cool short story.

Fair enough, and what you do sounds cool. What I'm saying isn't really directed at you specifically, but rather to the people I see/hear every day making the same claims in a business context. A lot of vanity metrics without a lot of connection to the bottom line.

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.

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