San Francisco (AFP): Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on Friday said that atest of hiding “likes” at the image and photo sharing social network willspread to the US.
“Heads up! We’ve been testing making likes private on Instagram in a numberof countries this year,” Mosseri said in a tweet.
“We’re expanding those tests to include a small portion of people in the USnext week.”
Facebook in September confirmed it is dabbling with no longer making apublic display of how many “likes” are racked up by posts.
Such a change could ease pressure to win approval with images, videos orcomments and, instead, get people to simply focus on what is in the posts.
Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this year announced it was testing hidinglike counts and video view tallies in more than a half-dozen countries,with account holders still able to see the numbers but masking amounts fromothers.
Twitter has also experimented with hiding numbers of times tweets were”liked” or “retweeted,” according to product lead Kayvon Beykpour.
Twitter found that people engaged less with tweets when they couldn’t seethe counts.
“When you remove engagement indicators, people engage less,” Beykpour saidwhile briefing journalists at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco earlierthis year.