Instagram try removing Likes
The news has jumped on the portal TechCrunch where the engineer Jane Manchun Wong discovered this design change in the code of Instagram for Android devices .
Surely you'll wonder why these tests, right?. Well, everything indicates that they want to eliminate the "Like" counter to soften the competition and pressure generated by Instagram among some users.
Are you one of them?.
Instagram tries to eliminate the "Likes" counter that photos and videos receive:
How can you see in the following photograph, in the image on the left we can see a publication in which the "Likes" are not shown. If it is possible to see some of the people who have given the "like", but we cannot see the total received.
Screenshot without liking you (Photo by TechCrunch.com)
The total number of likes a post receives could only be seen by the person who shared that photo or video. We can see how the author of a publication would visualize it, in the central capture of the image that we have shared before.
From Instagram comment that they want followers to focus on what you share and not on how many likes your posts receive.
We can say that by making this small change, the so-called herd effect would be minimized, in which many people only like what you have thousands and thousands of Likes.It would also reduce the feeling of competition on Instagram, since users would not be able to compare their stats with other friends and/or creators. It could also encourage a lot of creators to post more authentic content instead of trying to share content to rack up likes.
A spokesperson for Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that this design is an internal prototype that is not yet available to the public. This is not to say that it will be applied in the future, but he comments that “exploring ways to reduce the pressure on Instagram is something we are always thinking about.”
Hide Likes could put more emphasis on followers and comments. Even if they were to hide them, they would still be a variable with a great impact on the publication classification algorithm.
The change wouldn't seem bad to us, and you?
