How many of us can deny the fact that smartphones have revolutionized our lives. Everything that we could think of as a miracle has become a reality today. “Swipe your screen” and Voila! Here comes the object we desired..Phew, what a feeling..
Now, without being overtly diplomatic, can you please answer a simple question for me ? How do you feel when you get “likes” on a pic that you recently posted..Well, the honest answer would be “I feel ecstatic!”. More the likes, more is the feel good factor, infact the perfect feed for our ego !So much so that many people fail to take things on their stride and this adversely affects their mental health, opine leading psychiatrists.
Sadly, very soon, Facebook is going to camouflage (read it as hide) likes on News feed posts . This would be an extension of the test that had been carried out on the Instagram Like feature during August 2019 . This was done to help snap user’s obsession with getting more and more likes on the pictures posted by them on the popular social media platform . .
When implemented, Facebook posts will not show the number of likes/reactions to a particular post . Prominent app researcher Jane Manchung Wong was the first to discover this and says , “I observed that Facebook has recently begun prototyping this hidden like/reaction count feature in their Android app by reverse-engineering the app and playing with the code underneath”. The user who has created the post would be able to view the list of people with the reactions but at the same time the number of reactions would not be displayed on the news feed. However, it may be noted that likes and reactions on the comments made would be visible to the users .
As of now, the likes/reactions count is not hidden as development is still on and is yet to be implemented across platforms . Interestingly, initially Instagram tested the Hidden like count feature in Canada and then gradually moved over to other countries . And now Facebook follows suit.
If we take a look at the Pros, by hiding the Like count from everybody apart from the creator of the post , the user would definitely be at ease and would feel less apprehensive about the popularity of the content. Statistics show that in today’s scenario,social media plays a crucial role in influencing mental health of people specially the Millenials and Centenials. Several cases of anxiety and depression can be attributed for being unable to cope with the pressure created by the feeling of “Being appreciated” by fellow beings on popular social media platforms.
Interestingly,for the first time in history, in order to curb the bias by metrics, Prof.Ben Grosser from the University of Illiois, had first created the “Facebook Demetricator” in the year 2012 . It is basically a chrome extension that helps modify Facebook in order to remove the visibility of Facebook counts .
What I feel
Last but not the least, for the well being of mankind, Facebook is trying to undo the damages done. I opine that this should have been done long back, but as is said “Better late than never”. As a matter of fact,it takes considerable time to observe, research , develop and implement experimental features like this. I am sure that this feature of hiding Like counts is definitely going to have a positive impact on the digital well being of billions of users across the globe.