Have you ever uploaded a photo on Instagram, that made you self-conscious when you don’t receive as many ‘likes’ as you expected? If yes! There’s a good news for you. Instagram and Facebook after years of testing have now settled for an opt-in experience that will allow users on both the platforms to hide like counts on their own posts, as well as hide like counts on posts they see from other people in their feed.
The new feature can be enabled and disabled as per the convenience of the user. Through this feature, the company tries to aim to ‘depressurise people on social media’. The feature was being tested in several countries since 2019, but it is now being rolled out globally.
The tech giants are incorporating these features as during the testing research phase, it was found that there is ‘little association’ between social media use and mental health in teenagers. Social media affects the mental health of a person in multiple ways as sometimes not getting enough likes on the posts makes a person self-conscious.
Keeping this in mind, Facebook said that by hiding like counts, the company wants its users to focus on consuming and sharing content and not get preoccupied with the number of likes they receive on posts shared.
Apart from this, Facebook even said that while not seeing like counts can prove beneficial for some people, but might annoy a few as well, particularly because some people on social media use these like counts to get a sense for what’s trending or popular, and that is the company is offering users the choice, of whether they want to use this new feature or not.
The feature is now available on both platforms. Also, users are provided with the option to hide like counts on a per-post basis on Instagram in order to give more flexibility to the users. Facebook will get these same per-post controls in the next few weeks.