Most of the social networking sites these days have become highly attentive towards introducing the best possible security standards and making the platform more user-friendly. Following the same trend, Instagram is also taking steps to provide more safety, security and making the app more amicable for its millions of users.
Taking a step forward towards these things, Instagram decided to expand its test to hide like counts. It has decided to give more users the options to hide the counts on their posts publicly. Recently it made an official announcement where it decided to expand the test regarding hiding the like count to six more countries- Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.
The test initially was started in Canada. At the initial stage of the test, only some people were included and they had their likes hidden by default. They had to choose to opt-out the likes publicly. But, there is another aspect to this, the people who had their likes count hidden can still see the likes on their own content.
Well, this is a known fact that a number of likes have become a de facto way of providing value on user’s posts. But Instagram decided to hide it due to the reason that it wants its audience to focus more on the posts, videos, and content and not on the number of likes. It can be said here that they do not want you to judge the posts by the number of likes it receives.
There is another aspect to this test undertaken by Instagram as to why it has decided to expand it. There are times when a photo of yours might not receive much appreciation or likes. This often lowers the confidence of the respective user and in the future, he/she is attentive about posting similar posts, for example- a selfie in a swimsuit, food photos, etc. This is because more likes signify that the post is more impressive than others and getting lesser likes makes you feel terrible.
But, this latest feature of hiding the public count will give all the users the permission and confidence to post whatever content, photo or video they may like and seem fit to post. The post won’t be based on the basis of a number of likes or hits. This will be fruitful because people would stop caring too much about the likes on the post and will put whatever they feel like to post.
Thus, hiding the likes from feeds, posts, videos but making it visible to the person who posts it, would give people sensibility about what is working. And, they don’t have to worry about what opinions people form regarding their personal feeds. Overall, it boosts their confidence to post whatever their heart says to and not what people want would hit like on.
So, if you live in the countries where this test is been carried out, then your Instagram would only show the name/username of the person who likes your post but not the number of people who hit the like button.
