At a conference on Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that Instagram will start hiding likes for US users from next week. He also mentioned that not all US users will be affected immediately.
In May, the platform started to test hiding likes for users in Canada and since then people have been debating about the effects this change would have on engagement and marketing, etc.
"It's about young people - the idea is to try and depressurize Instagram, make it less of a competition, give people more space to focus on connecting with people that they love, things that inspire them. But it's really focused on young people.", Mosseri said.
"We have to see how it affects how people feel about the platform, how it affects how they use the platform, how it affects the creator eco-system, but I've been spending a lot of time on this personally.", he added.
However, Instagram hasn't shared any results of the tests, and we are unsure of how big the impact has been or would be.
A study observed that the total like count has dropped in regions for influencers where Instagram ran the tests. But since the study was confined to influencers, we can not tell what effect this had on all users.
According to Mosseri, this step was taken to reduce the societal pressure young people had on 'getting more likes' and make the platform a place where people connect with others and share things they are passionate about.
Since Instagram will now be running tests in the US, we can assume that the platform gained results but we are still unsure how big of a difference this change would make or if it would make any difference at all.
