The Effects of Instagram’s Decision to Remove the Display of Likes
https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-removing-likes-worldwide-test-2019-11
Over the past few months, Instagram has been removing the display of likes on images in certain countries. In the last few weeks, this became a worldwide change.
In lecture, we learned about the “boom-or-bust” effect of the display of people’s reaction to certain content. This effect is the result of reactor’s decisions based on information.
Displaying the likes increases the number of likes on posts with an already high number of likes. This is because people will trust that other people liked it due to its quality or enjoyability. Thus, more people will like it given that these highly-liked posts are more likely to be high-quality or enjoyable. Posts with fewer likes will have a harder time gaining likes for the contrapositive reason. People will suppose the low number of likes are due to a lack of quality or enjoyability. Thus lower-liked posts will get even fewer likes.
So we know that, with the display of likes, posts with a lot of likes will attract even more likes, but posts are less likely to pass that low-like barrier (given that a low-like post is less likely to attract likes from the start, even if it is a good, high-quality post). Thus, there would be fewer highly-liked posts. So, we can surmise that without this display of likes, this “boom-or-bust” effect will be less pronounced. There will likely be more posts with an “average” number of likes, there would be more highly-liked posts, and there will be fewer very lowly-liked posts (given that that low-like barrier will not exist). This is the result of the lack of information-based decision making.
The removal of this feature would cause the like distribution to not as closely follow the power-law distribution—there are more posts with a very high number of likes, and much fewer posts with a very low number of likes.
There are other effects to be considered. There will be more posts, and more low-quality posts, as people are more likely to post content. This is because users will not be concerned with negative public perception (as people can not see the limited number of likes that would result in a lower-quality post). This change would then change Instagram into a more pure content-sharing platform–with less of an emphasis on public perception, people will just want to post content that they enjoy, personally.