Here's why Instagram is experimenting with hiding how many likes a photo has
Photo: Hocus-Focus/Getty Images A couple of days ago, Instagram announced that it was expanding a controversial test to select users in a few of its global territories. The test is for Instagram to study the effect of hiding how many likes a photo has from everyone except the user who posted the photo.
The idea of deemphasizing metric such as like counts and video views is part of a wider push by large tech companies to make their products more quote-unquote ethical and less coldly motivated by quantitative metrics. Apple now has its Screen Time feature to show users how much time they spend on certain apps, and Twitter has considered hiding follower counts, for instance.
These types of changes have dramatically recontextualized what a like’s function is. In the beginning, a like was straightforward — it was a way to say “Hey, I saw this; cool” without everyone in the comments of a post repeating variations of the same idea over and over again. It was a tool for communicative efficiency.
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