One of the most convincing reasons I've heard for why certain social media sites succeed and fail have to do with how well they manage the balances between utility and status game (i.e. come for the tools, stay for the network). You tweet because you want likes/retweets. You post because you want likes/comments.
Even if you can see your own likes, removing visibility on others changes the nature of this dynamic. Half the reward for "scoring" a bunch of likes/upvotes/karma is that others see that you have scored a lot. What constitutes a "successful" post is all relative too. Effectively, Instagram is betting on the "utility" of sharing photos, which I'm not sure is all that strong. I've deleted my Instagram a while ago, but while I was using, it was clear that it was a highly comparative medium by nature.
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:
Didn't know there was such a feature, but most "influencer" feature accounts don't do that, they download and repost the image, and write captions designed to push credits to the bottom, like:
C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s,
YOU OWN THE NIGHT!!! AWESOME PICTURE! [clap] [clap] [clap]
.
.
.
-------------------------------
photographer: @artist_username
And the problem? Instagram's ranking algorithm promotes these idiots instead of @artist_username, and nobody ever sees who @artist_username is because it collapses the comment to the first 2 lines. It's really like a "congratulations but f-you", and I wish they'd crack down on this.
Artists often don't even get reach beyond their followers at all -- the influencer feature accounts fill up peoples' discover pages. Artists continue to fall for the feature accounts, trying to get featured for exposure (that they don't actually get).
It would be much better if Instagram recognized good artist content and promoted it directly, avoiding this whole reposting nonsense. The easiest way would be
0. See how the artist content does in their own personal follower network
1. If it does well reaction/like-wise, increase the number of non-followers that see it that have similar hashtag interests
2. If it continues to do well, continue to broaden the set of people that see it.
I almost think the like counts being visible to the creator is also detrimental. 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 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 got an Instagram account in 8th grade after seeing pretty much every single one in my middle school already had one (which was 3-4 years ago).
I left 1-2 years into using it as I was realizing how detrimental it was to see so many people going into absurd lengths to obfuscate their very normal lives.
Lately I've heard people getting "business" accounts, which initially seems absurd, but it seems like a lot of people are doing this to get more analytics about their accounts... which is very concerning.
Not sure how this will affect business accounts, but this will help some new people that come onto the platform initially I guess.
Do they still show following/follower counts? That should go next.
I suspect most people who grew up with it have a lower chance of having neuroses around it. In the very least, the standard issue 25 year old is only passively engaged with social media in my experience as a current 25 year old. Outliers exist but it’s kind of obvious to everyone else that social media obsession is weird and unhealthy
>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.
Weird that like counts fell when people couldn't see how many likes their were. I guess people are scared to be one of only a few likes? Or they want to be cool and like what everyone else likes? I'm the opposite, if something has 5000 likes, what's the point of adding more? They don't need my charity. I'll save my likes for the needy.
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.
“Shop $url and use $code to receive $discount of your order,” is pretty standard for those of us who are small time “influencers.” They don’t rely on our likes but on how much we actually increases their sales which they can see via our specific code. Likes do help us figure out what people might want to see.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Apparently, this is happening in Facebook as well.
I wonder how they are accounting for cultural ambiguity when it comes to Likes. In Philippines, most users click like on almost every post they scroll as kind of acknowledgement that they've seen it. Even in other places, many do this for comments when they have nothing to reply.
If removing 'Like' does improve quality of discourse, then it's great; but then again if improving quality of discourse was the motive they would have integrated the 'Dislike' button.
>“We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s well-being and health” says Instagram’s CEO
Hmm, nah. This isn’t a business decision any reasonable company would make on those grounds alone. It might be a part of it but I doubt it’s the most important thing.
I think what they’re seeing is people probably post more when the pressure of the total number of likes isn’t something to take into consideration. It will become far less “curated perfect photos” and instead be more slices of everyone’s life.
And when people post more, other people spend more time on the app because there is more content to consume, even when we roll our eyes as our buddy Chris posts the third photo of his toddler that day.
> 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.
> 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 am not sure that like counts mean anything anyway. If 10 people see a post that is 40% likeable and 40 people see a post that is 10% likeable, both will have the same like count. Since liking things is apparently what gets that thing in front of more people, all popularity ends up meaning is that the post had some early traction. It could be intrinsically likeable, it could be intrinsically engaging, or it could be a statistical anomaly.
I would be really interested to see what social media looked like if you could, say, only post once a day. Then there would be less need to filter things, and things would not be artificially put in front of you for you to like or dislike. You'd just have everything, but it would be manageable.
"Time on site" would probably decrease, though, so it will never happen. We need people to be on Instagram for 16 hours a day. It's crucial.
Most of my interactions on Instagram are via stories, which don't have like counts. In fact, going through the feed has become a chore because I have to like almost all of the posts (from people I like at least, I usually don't bother with big accounts that already get tons of likes on every post). I'd rather not have to bother with all the double tapping. If I really, really like a post I can always leave a comment.
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).
All of the stats about likes from the third party focus only on influencer profiles — I wonder how removing like count has affected and will affect an average user's engagement.
This is bs. The reason for this is they're squeezing the last ad $ out of their product. If as me you also had a bunch of 100K+ accounts (and a bunch of friends with them) you would have noticed a steady decline during the last year in likes. That's the same that FB does with each of their properties. they limit reach so you have to pay.
This is the definitive RIP on IG's organic reach. Between the ineffective reach, scummy ways to track clicks and views, misleading reach numbers, a great % of FB being bots and all this, I can't consider FB anything but a scam for advertisers/creators and cigarettes for users.
To see how to operate a network correctly look at Google with Youtube. The reach is pretty much always the same (15 years later, you still can go from 0 to millions without spending a $ or any kind of boost), and you get paid for every view, based on your kind of content while users aren't sucked into dopamine loops (except from the one provided by simply watching a video).
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.
Less people will bother to like posts. Aka less organic reach. It has been demonstrated that a post with more likes is more likely to be liked. Advertisers buy fake likes just for that very same reason on their ads.
