Instagram Hiding Likes for The U.S | What does it mean?

Overview: News broke from the WIRED25 Conference when Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, announced that Instagram will begin hiding likes as soon as next week for U.S users.

We see a lot of users making jokes at “Instagram models” expense, saying their out of a job, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The first thing to be clear is that Instagram is not taking likes away, you will still be able to like posts and people will still be able to like your posts, you will still be able to see all the likes that you get, but other people won’t.

This will no doubt cause a change in the game.

It will be interesting to see how everything plays out. Models and Influencers will be able to take screenshots and show them to brands to prove their getting likes when brokering deals. But, something I’m curious about, which may not play a factor at all, but we will see if “herd mentality” plays a role in the level of engagement that occurs.

Vanity Metrics will be in the form of comments in the public users mind.

Why This is a good thing: This is a good thing for a number of reasons. The main ones, which Instagram are pushing as their main motivators in this action are mental health and content. They don’t want people stressing over likes, they want it to be less of a popularity contest and more of what it was supposed to be.

Mosseri said the move is aimed at young people. “The idea is to depressurize Instagram, make it less of a competition,” he said, in remarks given at the Wired 25 Conference.

Which leads into the “content”, if people are stressing less about what will get them likes and what won’t, they will focus more on the content they truly want to create, which should usually lead to better content. You may not stress over likes, but it is indeed a serious problem, social media has been linked to countless cases of mental illness ranging from all over the board. On the flip side, it could cause a whole other slew of mental illness problems, you know like people upset that people don’t know how much other people think their cool, lol. Which leads us into the next segment.

Why this is a bad thing: This can be bad for a number of reasons, which can vary depending on who you are. For example, the people that already do well on the platform are not going to like this move because there going to want everyone to see how well their content is performing, that their not some digital bum. Social Media has made some people incredibly vain. Nick Minaj tweeted this about the topic:

“I’m not posting on IG after this week cuz they removing the likes,” she wrote on Twitter. “Hmmmm what should I get into now? Think of all the time I’ll have with my new life.”

Who knows her exact reasoning? But I mean what else could it be. Thats what these social media platforms have turned into, who can get the most likes.

As I brushed on earlier and just above, this could unintentionally cause new mental health issues as funny as that sounds, but young people may be too deep in this digital age and require the validation that social media engagement provides, and although they will still be able to see their engagement, the fact that others can’t could have a psychological effect, I can already see people posting stats for the content in the comments, “I swear it didn’t flop”, lol. This would be extreme cases, but they do exist.

Whats This Mean? End of The World? It means a few things, your not going to be able to gauge how well your content is doing compared to another piece of content. You won’t be able to as effectively tell whether or not something is working well or not for a post. You won’t be able to get mad that a piece of content that you deem inferior to yours is performing better. Those are habits Instagram’s trying to get rid of, don’t worry about what works for others, find what works for you, be original, there’s more to it obviously but I like to look at it like that and encourage everyone to do the same.

Other social networks have made comment about testing the same type of thing, social media could be changing right before our eyes.