
Facebook tries hiding Like counts to fight envy - nradov
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/facebook-hides-likes/
======
ajxs
At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I suspect that the recent trend of
social media platforms hiding engagement metrics has less to do with fighting
'envy' than simply allowing for more authentic looking proliferation of
promoted content. I came to this conclusion from using Instagram after their
recent change to hide 'likes'. Even more conspiratorially, I imagine it also
helps the platform hide and demote content that is ideological unfavourable or
competitive to the platform.

~~~
pluckingdaisies
[throwaway for obvious reasons]

As one of the people who initiated the hidden likes test on Instagram, I can
confidently and authoritatively say you're incorrect. There was no ill intent.
It was solely to see if we could make people feel less self conscious by
decreasing social comparison. Our hope was to decrease the pressure normal
people feel about sharing their lives with their friends and family. We
thought this might improve some long-term metrics, but once we discussed the
rationale for the test with leadership, the well-being opportunity trumped any
impact on metrics--positive or negative.

Also, we [IG] did this first, and we started it for the right reasons. Blue
followed our lead. Believe it or not, there are people who give a shit about
well-being at FB.

[edited because jazzy was right that I was too harsh]

~~~
nooyurrsdey
Not sure why your comment is so aggressive and defensive. OP acknowledged they
were being conspiratorial.

Also there might not be any explcit intent for your team to impelemt the above
but sometimes these things emerge as slow influence that comes from the
guiding hand of top level influence over time. A healthy dose of skepticism
regarding social media is more than warranted, you can't be upset that anyone
would be led to think that after the 2 decades of such decisions made by
social media giants

~~~
cm2187
And I think very few people or companies do things for a single reason. There
is always a list of pros and cons.

------
Hokusai
My anecdotal experience is that people, in general, are less engaged with
Facebook. What used to be news about friends are now shares of some political
news source. And the number of people liking or commenting has gone down.

In my circles, what used to be one hundred likes now is a dozen. Most posts
only have one or two likes.

If this trend is similar across Facebook to hide the counts makes sense to
hide the lack of interest.

Or, it could be that Facebook has changed and they are changing their business
model. My bet is that hey really want to hide the lack of interaction and
still don't care for the results of their actions.

~~~
hombre_fatal
How much of that is just you and your crowd getting older and your social
circle getting smaller?

Make some younger and cuter FB friends that have growing social circles
because they're in uni and you'll see some impressive numbers on the
scoreboard again.

I think this explains a lot more of HNer commentary on FB than people like to
admit. "In my personal experience, only old people use FB. My feed is full of
parents posting about their children, ugh. FB didn't use to be like this when
I was in uni 12 years ago!"

~~~
bmarquez
My anecdotal experience is that the "younger and cuter" crowd has moved on to
Instagram, or even Snapchat. Many more options in social media than 12 years
ago.

~~~
wolco
There are less options compared to back then.

Nevermind MySpace,friendster, Hi5 or xing you had the biggest aol. Then you
had messenger programs (aim, icq, yahoo, msn, etc). You had irc.

You had blogging or photo communities like flickr or meetup.com for events.

Facebook, twitter and reddit were around just not as popular.

~~~
bmarquez
Around the time of the parent comment, 12 years ago, Facebook was eating
everyone else's lunch.

Friendster was dead, Myspace was in decline (mainly because FB opened up to
everyone besides college students), nobody I knew in the USA used Hi5 or xing.

Flickr, meetup, and IRC existed and still exist but they were never the
primary social network for the "younger and cuter" college crowd.

If you wanted to connect with your cute classmate 12 years ago, it was almost
certain she had a Facebook. It would no longer be certain today.

I actually miss the 2007-era Facebook. No likes, no timeline algorithm, no
shares/reposts made for a fun experience at the time.

------
prawn
I don't believe it's to fight envy. Don't give them that much credit. I can't
speak for Facebook as I'm not familiar with their interface, but I can for
Instagram.

Prolific users tend to hit a wall that paralyses them. As their audience
grows, they go from comfortably posting whatever takes their fancy to fretting
over metrics and all the gaming that goes on. Is this photo good enough? Is it
spectacular? Will it struggle to get stats and embarrass me?

I've seen people go from regular users to just seizing up and posting nothing
for weeks on end. Longer they pause, the bigger the pressure to resume. One
friend of mine was basically full-time on Instagram as an influencer and then
just stopped for months and months.

I think if they're hiding likes, it's almost entirely because it's hurting
their overall engagement, not because they care about people.

~~~
ISL
I believe that the plan to hide likes on Instagram is to help FB get a larger
cut of the influencer revenue stream. If influencers can't readily prove their
value to ad-buyers without getting analytics data from Instagram, buyers will
turn to Instagram either for those data or simply place ads directly with
Instagram.

------
situational87
I'd bet a large chunk people who read HN have spent the past decade or more
working on one thing: increase user engagement. I am one of them for sure.

All the networks seem to be realizing that wasn't such a grand idea and are
now experimenting with unraveling these features. It's an implicit admission
we've all been wasting our time making the world a worse place.

~~~
astura
Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the vast majority software
is written for business use, not for consumer use.

------
eschulz
Instagram is their envy-based asset so this makes sense since they don't want
to cannibalize their businesses.

~~~
tormeh
So much this. Instagram is, as far as I can see, the most psychologically
unhealthy parts of social media, distilled. Why anyone would want to use it I
don't know.

~~~
ceejayoz
I have a strict no-influencer and no memes/politics policy in mine and the
resulting feed is a delight. Hobby ideas, good food, friends and family goings
on, etc.

All depends on who you follow.

~~~
prawn
I have multiple accounts and with my personal one, I follow people I know and
as you say, it's family outings and so on. Makes it much easier when catching
up with acquaintances to have some idea of what's happening in their lives
(just had a holiday, renovating their house, tried a restaurant, etc).

------
starpilot
How about just removing likes altogether? Facebook is OPTIMIZED for petty
flamewars, because that equals engagement and ad views, and the karma system
is at the heart of it. I participate in many rock climbing forums
(MountainProject, various subreddits) and the climbing groups on Facebook have
a unique level of vitriol. It is just a fun sport, not politics, not religion,
but somehow FB foments vicious debate in spite of it. I actually saw one group
for climbing partners in Canada that the admin shut down because he was sick
of how it decayed. I've never seen anything like it.

~~~
koboll
>Facebook is OPTIMIZED for petty flamewars, because that equals engagement and
ad views,

Political disengagement is the modal average political affiliation. Incentives
that make partisans angrier and shoutier on your platform are likely to
backfire with the politically disengaged.

So maybe in the short run this is true, but over a longer time horizon,
fostering an environment where "petty flamewars" proliferate is going to
alienate a lot of users, to the point where attrition may outweigh any
engagement benefits gained.

~~~
zrobotics
I know I'm not the only one who doesn't use Facebook because of crap like
this. I didn't go as far as deleting my account, but I haven't logged on in >1
year simply because it had gotten to the level of YouTube comments.

I don't know what specifically Facebook did to encourage that level of
vitriol, but for whatever reason I consistently saw more rudeness and
bickering on Facebook than anywhere else I spend time online. For instance, I
was in a group for vintage Ducati motorcycles, and half the comments were
bickering about petty details, whereas posting on a forum would almost always
lead to helpful information or compliments on the bike.

Facebook may just be starting to reap what they sowed; petty flame wars
definitely drive up engagement for a short period until they start driving
other users away. The people involved in the argument definitely check back
much more often to ensure they got the last word in, and users leaving isn't
always as visible.

------
jonbronson
This will escalate the impact of trolls on news articles. Currently, a well-
received article might have hundreds or thousands of Likes and Loves, next to
a 3-5 Laughs from those wishing to troll/deride the content. At least now you
can click and see what the distribution is and verify yes, its just a few
trolls. With this change, a single troll would surface a laugh which is
seemingly on par with the other reactions. It's a poor metric, but this makes
it worse.

~~~
dougb5
What do you think about getting rid of the "laugh" reaction? I feel like that
could make Facebook less toxic in one stroke, since it is so often used to
troll and deride, as you observe. There are non-troll uses of the laugh
reaction, to be sure, but the like/love reactions can absorb these.

------
chrshawkes
I think they are doing this not because it's helpful to the users. People
share garbage all the time. They sometimes feel bad that only one or two
people liked their garbage. Now they have no idea, so they will share more
garbage and use the site more. I'm done with Facebook entirely. I've been
using it since 2011. I never go on it anymore for the past few years. I never
update and I deleted everyone who wasn't a close family member as well as make
everything private. It's not a product I care to use anymore. I never got on
the instagram train and don't plan to. This is from a guy who has 130k
subscribers on my YouTube channel and 2500 followers on Twitter. I just don't
like Facebook's platform or Instagram. I also hated that Instagram gave my
teenage daughter tons of creepy followers. Facebook is most certainly a
detriment to society.

------
Smithalicious
I hope this is a step on the road of phasing out "likes" entirely. I really
hate the concept. Even on HN, where it works comparatively well (comment score
isn't directly visible, new users can't downvote etc) it bothers me, softly
nudging me towards making comments that I know will get easy upvotes or not
expressing controversial sentiments. At the end of the day you can't really
get around the fact that these systems encourage people to post "popular"
content. That helps filter out the true trash, but ultimately leads to
monoculture, in my opinion.

~~~
austincheney
I don't know if the 500 karma rule for enabling downvotes is enough any more
with the number of throwaway accounts I see on here. If would be nice if the
vote history were visible for a given account to see if people were using
temporary accounts for trolling the vote system. A single user with several
throwaway accounts, each over 500 karma, could add a false perception of
actual user activity.

~~~
kuu
I'm not sure is that easy to achieve 500 karma with a throwaway account... Not
to mention with many

~~~
austincheney
Here are 2 of them with 4000 and 7000 karma.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21051459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21051459)

Acquiring karma is a game. If you know how to play to game you can get a 1000
in a week easily. Its much easier to gain karma than lose karma though.

------
hos234
I am interested in seeing the effects on Politicians and News Media (not
actual journalists but the talking head/news reader/podcaster/blogger/standup
comedian/outrager class).

Social media metrics deeply influence their behavior (and the behavior of
their fan clubs). Too many of them justify what they do because they think the
like counts validate it.

------
inlined
> If the test improves people’s sense of well-being _without tanking user
> engagement_ , it could expand to more countries

So presumedly Facebook has a metric that models a user’s well being and values
engagement more.

------
ptah
> hidden from everyone else who will only be able to see who but now how many
> people gave a thumbs-up or other reaction.

if you can see a list of who has reacted, you can still tally it up to see
what the number of reactions are

------
kraig911
Likes have turned into emperor new clothes for content.

Chocolate cake while cool everyone will like it.

Me sharing my dog is missing or I have a garage sale gives actual value to the
platform.

------
HNLurker2
Thank God I can see still the likes. To know if I'm valuable or not and my
peers approve of me.

------
ineedasername
Comment count is still visible, which is probably just as much an enviable
metric.

