This is a great idea, but it misses the mark in one key respect. While it professes to reduce the pressure on users, it continues to enable the “high score” addiction that drives engagement metrics — and thus advertising revenue — higher to Instagram’s benefit at their users’ expense.
Instagram’s position is that they are testing whether hiding your post accounts from others is sufficient to stop people from agonizing over how many likes their posts have. I am glad that they are testing this, but I do not think it will be sufficient.
Humans are incentivized to chase high scores in all respects, especially when the score is an integer ranging from zero to infinity. Hiding counts from others, but showing them to the user, may remove a certain degree of external pressure. However the innate drive to increase that integer count will continue to pressure users into taking actions based on the count. This keeps the core addictive loop of “post, check counts, agonize, repeat” intact, and will ensure that Instagram suffers no drop in engagement due to treating the core addictiveness of their platform.
For those users that are subject to social pressure, the high score problem will also continue to be a source of obsession over approval by their followers. Social influence is extremely difficult to measure directly, and many people actively read the leaves of events in their lives to try and discern their standing in the eyes of others. Integer counts such as “likes” and “replies” feed directly into this obsessiveness, providing an inscrutable figure that obviously carries meaning if only sufficient time and energy are invested in consideration of it. This creates a second loop of addiction, which is often confused with the first.
Removing all positive 0..N integer counts will be the only way to treat the addictive loops of today’s social media, and doing so would crater precisely the advertising-centric metric that they all depend so critically on: Engagement.
I saw that comment elsewhere in this post’s replies and it’s better supporting evidence for why it’s harmful to give us integers than I ever could have dreamed of.
Instagram’s position is that they are testing whether hiding your post accounts from others is sufficient to stop people from agonizing over how many likes their posts have. I am glad that they are testing this, but I do not think it will be sufficient.
Humans are incentivized to chase high scores in all respects, especially when the score is an integer ranging from zero to infinity. Hiding counts from others, but showing them to the user, may remove a certain degree of external pressure. However the innate drive to increase that integer count will continue to pressure users into taking actions based on the count. This keeps the core addictive loop of “post, check counts, agonize, repeat” intact, and will ensure that Instagram suffers no drop in engagement due to treating the core addictiveness of their platform.
For those users that are subject to social pressure, the high score problem will also continue to be a source of obsession over approval by their followers. Social influence is extremely difficult to measure directly, and many people actively read the leaves of events in their lives to try and discern their standing in the eyes of others. Integer counts such as “likes” and “replies” feed directly into this obsessiveness, providing an inscrutable figure that obviously carries meaning if only sufficient time and energy are invested in consideration of it. This creates a second loop of addiction, which is often confused with the first.
Removing all positive 0..N integer counts will be the only way to treat the addictive loops of today’s social media, and doing so would crater precisely the advertising-centric metric that they all depend so critically on: Engagement.