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Comment by totaldex | Hacker News Reader

Even with positive intentions, I'm not convinced this will solve the problem in any meaningful way. Turning off likes might be perceived as someone being unhappy with their social media status relative to their peers (ie, not getting as many 'likes' as their friends), which signals its own stigma.

Users will be forced into a new dilemma: Enable likes and accept the 'social media pressure', or announce to everyone that they harbor some sort of insecurity about their social media status by turning them off.

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I'm not a social media user, but I'm actually considering to start using Instagram with this feature.

Disabling likes doesn't show that I harbor insecurity, it simply removes the 'rat race' feeling that I have with social media. (which was the reason why I stopped using it a couple years ago).

İt doesnt disable likes, it hides them.

I use Instagram but I don’t bother checking like counts or the list of who liked a post. You have to go out of your way to look for this information anyway.

I suppose disabling the feature could help those who can’t resist the impulse to check and who get upset if they don’t see the expected number of likes. It’s more of a forced self-control option.

I have known people who struggle with phone and social media addiction, but I have to say that the HN caricature of Instagram is nothing like my experience or that of anyone I know. Instagram has been great for keeping up with photos of friends’ hobbies, travels, kids, and other fun things to share. I suppose if someone felt significant jealousy or insecurity at other’s success or happiness then it could be stressful to see it presented so conveniently, but that’s more of a personal issue than an Instagram issue. If you stay in touch with people you’re going to hear about their kids, vacations, new house and new cars eventually anyway.

The real problem I’ve seen is addiction to scrolling through the discover page. I can see all of my friends’ updates on Instagram in 5-10 minutes per day at most. However, someone scrolling the discover page could waste endless hours consuming random content that has nothing to do with their social network.

It's a little weird to blame the users in the same post that explains how the app is designed to distract you from the healthy usage you advocate.

I’d suspect the warping of mental health might be primarily concentrated in younger people?

You probably don’t make it to 35, get all established in life, then Instagram tanks your whole sense of self worth.

Seems more plausible you’d be growing up, trying to find your place in the world, head on Instagram and get depressed cause it seems like everyone’s lifestyles are just so much better than yours.

I use Twitter and Instagram, and occasionally comment on Reddit. I don't bother to check the like/follow numbers on any of them.

It's almost as if the company that runs Instagram wants you to feel like they are truly, honestly, really, properly interested in losing the core of their business for the sake of your own mental health and the psychological wellbeing of society in general

TikTok just makes up the view counts. So everyone feels like they're growing an audience. Instagram could do the same. They probably will. It would probably both increase engagement and, would it be bad for mental health?

Anyway, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts 5 years ago.

Where is your source that TikTok makes up the view counts. As a developer myself, their interest graph is second to none. It has by far the best recommendation algorithm in the social media space to date. Of course they are doing it with all the data they collect, but it doesn't bother me because it shows me endless amounts of the type of content I want to see, which is not half-naked dancing teens, but lots of political commentary and real life stories.

Facebook also made up view counts on video. What can I say? What evidence do you have the counts are real?

If you’re going to make a claim against what a reasonable person would expect, the burden of proof is on you to support your claim. You said tik tok like counts aren’t real and someone asked you for source. Then, rather than giving a source, you made another unsupported claim about Facebook doing the same thing. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other, but I do enjoy reading HN for lively conversation and debate. I’d prefer the debate to be in good spirit and based on fact, not conjecture.

So you’re saying some random person on the internet has a higher burden of proof than a $55b company. In the pursuit of intellectual honesty, it also seems reasonable that for once some giant bullshit claim from a company is audited?

OTOH, now that disabling likes is an option, we can form a cultural norm that enabling likes on your post is a shame-worthy, petty, insecure, attention-seeking behavior.

who is we? and why would the typical social media user care what "we" think?

Precisely because the average social media user is petty, insecure, and attention-seeking. Like shaming is a fabulous concept I for one could get behind. Next up do follows, replies and retweets, and eventually people might slowly begin to measure social proof for themselves once more.

Can you imagine Donald Trump's twitter account with all those idiotic metrics scrubbed from it? It would have been a beautiful sight, just an angry old man typing in caps to himself

I doubt that such stigma will be very widespread. There's been a renewed focus within the society to focus on digital well-being, screen time, and general mental wellness connected to the overuse of social media platforms and smartphones. People will try this feature just out of curiosity, and be able to tell their peers about non-social standing related reasons for why it's useful.

The likelihood of that outcome seems likely to be proportional to age.

Or, to be more precise, inversely proportional to age

When they were testing this in Ireland over the last year, there was no option to see likes at all. That probably makes more sense than this.

I enjoyed that, it was quite a bit nicer.

Up until recently, that was the case for my IG account as well. I'm based in the US.

> Users will be forced into a new dilemma: Enable likes and accept the 'social media pressure', or announce to everyone that they harbor some sort of insecurity about their social media status by turning them off.

Isn't that just for your own view? Others will still see the likes I'm assuming?

It appears that this setting controls cross-account like visibility on posts:

"Even if a user has Like Counts enabled, they will not be able to see the number of likes on accounts or posts that have hidden them."

Sounds like the perfect solution if you want to say "we are releasing features that support a healthy usage of the our app", and at the same time make sure no one uses these features!

FWIW Casey Newton posted a writeup- they ran trials for a couple years and the response was polarized (some loved it, some hated it) and they couldn’t find any clear indicator that it was healthier for people.

I disagree. I have my strava runs set to private because I've found the dynamic of others liking my runs affecting my thinking. I've also entirely disabled my Facebook wall. I don't have Instagram, but I would enable this immediately if I ever were to join.

Instagram should allow users to simply set the number of likes to whatever they want to have displayed, and let it increment from there.

If Instagram is letting people turn the feature off, then it's likely that they don't actually need "likes" for their data-collection purposes.

>they don't actually need "likes" for their data-collection purposes.

Is that what's happening? My understanding is that you can hide the displaying of the likes, but still allow people to like them. In that case, the metrics are still being collected.

They still allow users to like. However, you might be right that they don't really need it. They have engagement metrics based on your scrolling behavior.

Idk, I disable my friend count on facebook. I have 600, so not shame worthy, just fairly average. It's just unnecessary information. I think many like to the ability to not be "looked down on" by the >2000 crowd, and not "embarrass" the <100 crowd.

What the hell? What a meaningless metric by which to judge others or one's self. Facebook friends are cheap. I can send out 10,000 requests right now (~2 hours without writing a script, ~20 minutes with, assuming no rate limiting) and several thousand complete strangers will blindly accept.

I had no idea there were people out there who felt so strongly about this (not implying that you do, of course). If anything, I worry about people in the >2,000 crowd for practicing poor privacy hygiene given that the likelihood of truly knowing that many people is low and people share a lot of information on Facebook.

Reminds me a bit of Tinder Gold "hide my age" feature. Everyone has their age shown unless you pay extra to hide it, so hiding almost always will look worse than your actual age.

I just set an absurdly older age, while keeping my age filter the same. The 23 year olds actually looking for that can be amused and interested.

But since I said something now I guess I’ll have to pivot to something else.

In Japan, tinder verifies your age

It's the same thing as YouTube videos with comments disabled. "What are they hiding from?" becomes the question.

This is not for positive intentions. Instagram audience is getting old (like happened to FB) and they need to undercut platforms like TikTok. So they need to get into the untapped, and very promising, "children market". To do that they'll need to first correct everything that is wrong with instagram including features that helped it grow but now are seen as a negative influende on its users. But my guess is that they already know how to counter it with other "engagement acceleration" (aka addictive) features.

Also the comments are a big indicator of social media clout.

This is why the feature was introduced. Just a gesture.

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