Image credit – Jane Manchun Wong
It’s starting to feel that a reason why people post on social media these days is for the “likes”, which is basically a way of validating oneself, where popularity is judged by the number of likes a post gets. However, in a somewhat controversial move, it seems that Instagram is testing out a change in its user interface where likes will be hidden from your audience.
This was discovered by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, where as you can see in the screenshot above, it is possible that in the future, no one but you knows how many likes your post gets. Instead, what the public will see is that your post has been liked without mentioning how many people liked it.
As we said, it is a rather controversial decision since a lot of social media influencers rely on these likes to show how popular they are, and how they can command the prices they charge for advertorials and whatnot. However, Instagram does have an interesting point where they say, “We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get.”
It is unclear if Instagram plans on roll out this change for real or if they are simply testing it out and gather user feedback, but as we said, this will definitely ruffle some feathers.