After Instagram, Facebook?might soon remove the 'Likes' count on the next image or video that you share with your friends in order to curb the feeling of envy and jealousy among its users.?
Reuters
This sudden change was first noticed by popular reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, which was later confirmed by Facebook, in a conversation with TechCrunch. However, this is being tested internally and is not yet live for users.
Facebook hasn't really revealed the motives behind disabling likes on its social media platform but it feels like it is mostly being done to make its users feel secure and positive about their posts by not competing with others to get the most likes.
This could also help in reducing the number of deletion of posts by users, which usually used to happen when they'd realise that they haven't gotten enough likes or shares, to avoid humiliation from people. While this testing is still in an internal phase, if it sensed that it was impacting the revenue generation on the platform, it could roll back these changes and allow likes to be revealed once again.?
It started with something similar on Instagram (which was also first spotted by Wong) where it only revealed who among your common friend's list has liked a particular image and completely getting rid of the like count. It did this test in countries like Brazil, New Zealand, Italy, Japan and Ireland, among other countries.?
Reuters
While Facebook didn't really reveal the results of the test being done on Instagram, with the feature being tried on its own platform could very well indicate that they received a positive response from the testing on Instagram.
Facebook has been a common platform for people to share new things in their lives, whether it's their marriage, a new baby, academic success etc. And people tend to quantify this with the number of likes a person receives on a post, which can lead to very toxic thinking, impacting people's self-confidence and their freedom of sharing what they want to, with the people they love.