Why did likes disappear on Instagram?

Some of you may have noticed, but the social network is doing away with the likes counter in Belgium. And this is a good thing.

The social network had announced its desire to hide the number of people who like a photo. After a test phase in some countries, such as Australia, Brazil and Japan, the social network has just announced that it was standardizing this new functionality for users around the world. This explains why some of you now see “Loved by so-and-so and other people” instead of the traditional number of “buy real Instagram Likes”. But why this crazy idea? To lower the pressure and stimulate creativity.

With the introduction of the stories, the designers of the social network found that users posted fewer native photos, but on the other hand, dared more things on the side of ephemeral content. To compensate for the shyness of the “small” Instagram accounts, and to prevent them from gnawing at the blood if they did not obtain more than 30 likes on a snapshot, the social network, therefore, decided to hide its counters. A way to reduce the "need for validation" and therefore to move away from instant gratification and the opinion of others.

Will this revive creation?

It is an interesting experiment to carry out: to what extent do users react more to the figure displayed below our images than to the images themselves? To see if this will allow to unleash the spirits and restart the photo machine. One thing is certain, it should stop the "copies" and thousands of posts showing a sunset or glasses of champagne hitting each other. So concretely, you can always see the number of people who like your own content, but not the number of others.