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Instagram will try to hide the number of photos and watch the videos, to encourage users to be attentive to the content and not to the associated participation parameters, announced Tuesday the Facebook owner application.
During the test, users do not see the total number of "likes" on the photos, nor the number of views, videos, in their Instagram feeds or when visiting a user's profile. The account holder will still be able to access their own statistics and view the total number of likes or view the number of posts for a specific publication, although they will need to access a publication to view these metrics. Instagram said the private "likes" test would begin later this week for Canada's users at the F8, Facebook's annual developer conference.
Critics of social media companies said that the public's focus on indicators such as "likes" encouraged negative behaviors on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, bringing users to seek commitment to measure their self-esteem. Many social media companies use algorithms that take into account the likes of the publication or the views, among other metrics, to determine how to distribute that content to other users.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, told BuzzFeed News that the test was not intended to spur specific behavior, but "to create a less pressing environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves" and focus less on similar goals. "We hear people worry about the number of similar accounts they get," he said.
Preferences can also be an unclear way to measure the actual engagement of users. There are online services that allow Instagram users to buy likes or comments, while BuzzFeed News has shown that real people turn their own accounts into bots to exploit and benefit from mutual commitment.
Mosseri said he would not withdraw the full removal of similar accounts or video views in the future and said he hoped to learn from the first test.
He also said that he should be thinking of hiding his statistics in Stories, one of the most popular features of Instagram, in the future. Ephemeral stories, photos, and videos that are broadcast to a user's subscribers or groups allow the author of a message to see how many people have viewed this article (it does not display the article posting stories to subscribers).
"The stories were partly the inspiration for this test," Mosseri said.
Jane Manchun Wong, a technology blogger who inverts popular apps to develop new features, first spotted the test earlier this month in an internal prototype reserved for employees.
Instagram's test follows a similar test by Twitter. In an experimental prototype application called twttr, the counters of type "J" likes "and" Retweet "are hidden in the responses of a tweet as part of the company's efforts to improve understanding of conversations. Users must press each answer to see similar numbers and retweets.
As a disciple, without having seen the same number, "I do not have this information to help me judge if it's a good answer to read," said Lisa's product designer, Lisa Ding, explaining the "twttr" experience to BuzzFeed News. "Does that make you read more? How does this change the way you interact in a conversation? It's really interesting [to us]. "
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has openly talked about the possibility of removing other indicators, such as the number of followers, as well. "The question we are asking ourselves now is this: is it necessarily the right incentive? Is the number of followers for whom you really contributed to Twitter and this digital public place really a proxy? ", Said Dorsey in an interview with Inc. in September 2018
Mosseri said he was unaware of Twitter's beta tests involving hiding figures of engagement.
Jill Murphy, editor-in-chief of Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization that studies the digital well-being of minors, said the "race for more tastes" was leading children to post more, instead of thinking about content of their messages. . The miners, she noted, may not think of the long-term consequences of spreading all the thoughts or images of a digital recording.
While she is optimistic about potential changes in how companies display participation statistics, Murphy added that a simple adjustment would not be enough to move us away from a culture where the desire for approval is paramount.
"It's great that the industry is starting to take concrete and specific action, but is the removal of the commitment enough?", She said. "Is this the only solution? Probably not."
In January, in response to growing criticism that technology platforms were doing more harm than good, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would start focusing on "time well spent," a sentence that Zuckerberg defines as "a responsibility to ensure the safety of our services". Not only fun to use, but also good for the well-being of people. "It's not clear if removing the mentions on Instagram will actually make people less horrible about the popularity of their posts, or they simply focus on other forms of validation on the platform.
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