BUZZ BEAT MEDIA

Since the rise of social media, including Instagram, and seeing likes and shares of one’s content has been an inevitable experience for users. Many use it to their advantage, such as measuring whether one’s personal content or organization is gaining more traction or determining if their business is getting more popular. On the other hand, likes has also caused a lot of drawbacks for many–basing one’s success on such elements has caused pressure among people, especially for the younger generation.

Last Wednesday, Instagram has shared that it is tinkering with how likes are being seen on the popular app. The company will begin testing if the said option will prove to be a success, and if so, they will also likely apply the idea to Facebook. The purpose of the test is to ease the social pressure when posting on the social media site.

This time, the experiment is all about the option of whether users want to see the Likes on other profiles or not.

Not only that, the change will also include the ability to turn off the likes of their own posts, which means their own followers will not be able to see their number of likes.

It seems that they will be testing it on particular groups of users, similar to their operation that began in 2019. In 2020, the company’s experimenting with the like counts has been set aside for community efforts during the pandemic, and now they’re examining the feedbacks from their users who took part in the tests.

Many agree with the removal of likes from the app, with the idea that posting on Instagram can be anxiety-inducing when users think of how their posts might fail to receive enough likes. There is a lot especially within the influencer community, however, who disagree with the removal of likes due to it being a metric of brand value for such users.

As an Instagram user, what do you think of Instagram’s plan to change the way likes are being seen on the app? Comment down below!

*Cover Photo/Thumbnail by Lisa from Pexels