Instagram Without Likes
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/15/instagram-likes-influencers-social-media
In this new social-media fueled generation, being “Instagram famous” has become more and more elusive. The allure of easy money from paid sponsorships and a glamorous life has all risen from a relatively simple app. People can post pictures, acquire likes, and gather a following. Those who are popular on Instagram are called “influencers”. Companies have capitalized and narrowed into this “influencer market”, where they can advertise their products to large, niche, and loyal followings of so-called influencers.
The article from The Guardian explains how Instagram is testing a new feature that will hide the number of likes on posts. This is in an effort to create a less stressful user experience where users won’t worry about how successful or popular a post is. Instagram cites that it wants to “depressurize” creators and allow them to focus on content rather than feedback. Clearly, this generated a lot of backlash as influencers and creatives argued that likes were a metric of success and vital to their businesses.
Instagram likes are an interesting manifestation of the rich-get-richer phenomenon, as people tend to make decisions based on the people before them. The publicity of likes lets people see if others also liked a certain post, allowing them to make a decision to like or not like the same post. Presumably if a post gets more likes, someone is more likely to also like it. If we model it as a rich-get-richer model, then we can see that a post’s current popularity (measured by the amount of likes) is directly proportional to its increase in popularity. This can grow exponentially over time, which may explain how posts go viral. Although Instagram’s algorithm is private, let’s assume that a post with more likes is more likely to show up higher is someone’s feed, causing more people to like it, making it more popular and continuing the cycle until it becomes viral. If we follow the rich-get-richer model, then the fraction of posts with k likes is roughly 1/k^c. Just based on anecdotal evidence, there does seem to be a few popular posts with lots of likes that everyone has seen.
However, with Instagram’s new changes, we can expect to stray from this distribution. People will no longer be able to base their decisions on what’s popular because they can’t really gauge that without seeing the number of likes on a post. “Popular” posts may no longer become even more popular and the rich-get-richer effects lessen. As the article mentions, research also supports this. After Instagram tested this new feature, influencers saw like counts drop about 3 to 15%. For better or worse, the hidden likes will disassociate with the power-law distribution of popularity for posts.
Instagram certainly has good intentions with this like-hiding features–they want users to focus more on creating original and quality content rather than try to chase likes. They also want to address the negative mental health effects of social media in this increasingly connected world, where pictures of a glamorous life can easily foster negative body image perceptions and insecurities. Perhaps hiding the number of likes may help address these issues, but we can predict that it will stagnate this rich-get-richer model of popularity contests for posts.