Facebook is considering hiding the numbers of likes a post receives to people other than the person who created the post, similar to an experiment it’s doing with company-owned Instagram. The idea is to take away the “popularity contest” of posting, which makes people feel bad when their post doesn’t perform with big numbers. According to Psychology Today, rejection in digital form (not getting many. likes) can sting just as much as in the analog world. Among younger users on Instagram, posting becomes a contest to see who gets the most likes. Instagram that is testing non-visible likes told users, “We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get.”
You’ll now be able to toggle an option to hide all like counts on all posts in your feed on both Instagram and Facebook today. A separate option will let you hide your own like counts to others. You can also hide like counts on a per-post basis on Instagram, so there’s a little more flexibility to allow people to focus on the content of posts rather than the like counts. Facebook will get these same per-post controls in the next few weeks.
Facebook first started testing hidden like counts in September 2019 as an experiment to see if the change would improve the experience of using the platform. Instagram has also been testing a variety of ways to hide like counts in recent years, with a test for this same optional feature just last month.
Picture Credit : Google
