Adam Mosseri has announced on Twitter about Instagram experimenting with allowing some users to decide if they want to know the number of likes or not. The platform now allows some users to show likes on other people’s posts and disable likes on their own posts. Mosseri added that while experimenting on Instagram, they also tried to explore similar experiences on Facebook.
This happened just a month after Instagram hid such a large group of users. Instagram has been experimenting with hiding likes since 2019 to see if that eases the pressure some people feel when posting on the app. But not everyone accepts these changes, especially influential users who use Likes to do their work.
Mosseri told PBS NewsHour in 2019 that the whole goal of testing how to display likes on an app is to try to reduce anxiety and make comparisons on social media.
It’s not clear when the feature will be accessible to all Instagram users, rather than just a select group, but it’s clear that some big changes are underway.