Social media platforms are concerned about your like counts
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are really worried about the “like counts” or “heart counts”. In fact, they deployed and started testing features that hide “like counts on posts”. It’s frustrating and feels good at the same time because it’s almost confusing why these companies are so much worried about removing the count or “not showing” the count.
Concerns
Facebook really wants to avoid “Oh, I didn’t get enough likes, my life is getting worse” kind of thoughts or ideas popping inside their user’s mind. It’s pretty self-explanatory that these platforms are affecting the psychological balance of sensitive human beings.
Engineers have designed a brilliant user interface and experience into the Facebook platform which keeps a user addicted to the platform for long scrolling the feed and watching videos.
The real concern here is “whether facebook is driving the psychological balance of its users” which is the truth that nobody wants to swallow. The calculation is very simple, on an average, a consumer opens facebook at least 10-15 times spending over 3-5 hours watching videos and scrolling.
Well, if Facebook was a human being, it could’ve been an unbreakable connection.
Likes
So, if Facebook is that addictive and driving users to negative psychological stages, how does removing the like counts help?
It’s definitely a piece of sad news if you usually gain thousands of likes on Facebook. But it’s good news for people who barely gain any likes on Facebook. By not showing the like “counts”, Facebook can easily solve this problem to a greater extent.
You can only compare the content exposure or acceptance by measuring it with a number. Let’s say your friend has 500 likes on her profile picture and you got just 10. It might not make you feel bad because you might not care, but guess who cares?
Millions of Facebook users, which is the only reason why Facebook is seriously deploying such features.
Content
Facebook is different for different people. End of the day, Facebook is nothing but a media company where the content is generated by users and shared on a public platform (with certain privacy controls).
More quality content, better the platform. So the primary objective of Facebook should be to help users generate more content. Considering the case of content generation, the removal of like counts will actually help Facebook in terms of content generation. The number of users deleting a post due to low like counts will drastically reduce thereby putting more content on the platform.
Huge! Isn’t it?
Yes, it is an absolute win-win for both Facebook and its users. Instagram and Facebook are already testing the feature and expanding it slowly to reduce the risk. The final result will be here soon, let’s wait for that day when the number of likes becomes invisible.
