Instagram is going to test for ‘private likes’ count on images and videos in order to make the social environment less pressurized. In this, the followers will not be able to see the likes count on a post. This announcement was to be made official for the ‘F8 Annual developers conference’, to be held in Canada next week, but the news of testing is out already.
Instagram has made the declaration of ‘hiding likes’ in the interest of the users, according to Instagram’s Head of Product Mosseri. He stated that this is a logical step taken by the company considering the mental health and mindful usage of the social app. Likes, followers, and views have become Social media currency, for which the fight and struggle have deteriorated the quality of content being shared. The preference is to get likes first other than what is being shared. Due to this, a negative phenomenon to gain more and more attention is spoiling the mental health of the people somewhere.
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Why is it bad?
However, the impact of the decision might not be received favorably by everyone, especially the bloggers and influencers on Instagram. ‘Likes count’ being the symbol of growth and acceptance was great support for them to tell people about their reach. But their being gone private now, their validation will be missing and it is going to be a huge loss in terms of making their mark as an influencer.
Many critics have mentioned that this would leave a bad effect on the behavior of social media users. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, and obviously Instagram would lose an important factor that the audience used to work towards. A factor that was sort of a self-worth measuring tool will be gone now.
On the other hand, many analysis based companies also consider likes as a determining factor in various aspects, hiding likes will also affect them.
Official declarations by Instagram
To these doubts, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram explained that this decision was not about incentivizing a specific behavior among the users but was more about decreasing the pressurized environment, so that people feel comfortable in expressing themselves. They are not just worried about the reactions and liking, rather would think and post according to their opinions and expressions.
From this declaration, it is quite evident how hyper-activated users have become towards getting more counts, this had to stop somewhere or at least needed a pause to know beyond that.
Mosseri also stated that likes were not the accurate measuring tool to judge engagement and communication across the network, and was more of a status symbol. Sometimes, the likes, comments, and activities are done from fake accounts, therefore, the objective was not to remove the ‘like’ feature completely, but to learn from the test and work out on something more stable, fair and valid as a solution in the long-run.
Alongside, he hinted towards hiding the metrics in the story feature as well in the future, which is currently the most popular and loved feature of Instagram. In fact, the story feature was also one of the major inspiring factors for this test.
Many experts of the industry are considering as a positive step towards making the social environment more real, whereas many are still in doubt, and are in the opinion to rethink about the further implementation of this test.