SOURCE: SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL

Insta­gram is con­sid­er­ing hid­ing like counts on posts to reduce the sense of com­pe­ti­tion amongst users.

Jane Manchun Wong uncov­ered the test in the code of Instagram’s Android app:


A pop-up mes­sage in the screen­shot above states:

“We want your fol­low­ers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. Dur­ing this test, only the per­son who shared a post will see the total num­ber of likes it gets.”

In the exam­ple above you can see how the total like count is removed, and there’s now a link to ‘View Likes.’

Click­ing on ‘View Likes’ lets the user see the total num­ber of likes a posts has, and the indi­vid­ual users who liked it.

Oth­er users wouldn’t be able to see that infor­ma­tion. They can see when oth­er users they fol­low like a par­tic­u­lar posts, but they can’t see total like counts.

Insta­gram con­firmed to TechCrunch that this design is being worked on inter­nal­ly but is not vis­i­ble to the pub­lic yet.

So this may get an offi­cial release and it may not. For what it’s worth, a num­ber test fea­tures spot­ted by Jane Manchun Wong were even­tu­al­ly released publicly.

This could improve the Insta­gram expe­ri­ence in a num­ber of ways. Hid­ing like counts could make the whole expe­ri­ence feel more organic.

Peo­ple may feel more inclined to share what they want rather than focus­ing on what will get the most likes.

To that end, peo­ple may also feel less inclined to delete a post when it doesn’t meet a cer­tain thresh­old of likes.

Turn­ing Insta­gram into less of a pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tent sounds like a healthy move for everyone.