
Instagram to test hiding like counts in the US - asamant
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/08/instagram-hide-likes-us/
======
daxfohl
I thought the headline meant Instagram was going to start lurking in dark
spaces ready to suck your blood at night.

~~~
buboard
same. how do counts usually hide themselves?

------
augustinel
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.

A super interesting post on the nature of social networks here:
[https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-
service](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service)

~~~
dheera
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:

Artist's name [Follow button]

reposted by (feature account name)

[picture]

~~~
antigirl
You can already repost and it credits the original artist automatically like
tumblr, this is available for posts and stories.

~~~
dheera
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.

------
bigkm
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.

~~~
netsharc
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...

~~~
sdan
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.

~~~
andromeduck
The main reason to hurt business accounts is to schedule posts and post from
desktop IMO.

------
dplgk
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.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
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.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
If you give marketers access to your account, and your account can see like
counts, they'll still be able to measure the effectiveness.

This friction isn't probably worth it for a small-time influencer, but for the
bigger players, the marketers will still spare the pain.

The ultimate impact is more advertising dollars collecting for bigger
influencers, and smaller ones losing market share.

~~~
cgriswald
“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.

------
lostgame
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.

~~~
dperfect
> 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?

~~~
lostgame
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.

~~~
Terretta
> _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.

------
Abishek_Muthian
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.

~~~
Benjammer
>users click like on almost every post they scroll as kind of acknowledgement
that they've seen it

This is how my father in Indiana uses Facebook... haha

------
sharkweek
>“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.

~~~
eganist
> 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.

Disclosure: I'm speculatively long on snap

------
jrockway
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.

------
standardUser
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.

------
im3w1l
One effect of hiding like counts is elevating feed position (which ig has more
control over) as the primary indicator of social proof.

~~~
sdan
This brings up a good point:

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).

------
mtranzambetti
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.

------
francescopnpn
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).

~~~
undefined3840
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.

~~~
eaenki
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.

------
thewizardofaus
Old versions of the app do not remove the like count.

------
spyder
The number of comments gonna increase with thumbs up and hearth emojis :).

------
HNLurker2
Cease to show and you'll cease to envy

