Instagram/Facebook removing like counts: Necessary change? Or trophies for everyone?

In school, popularity was everything to me. I would sport the brand names, mimic the cool phrases, and jump off a bridge if I needed to (luckily it never came to that). In school, everyone knew who was popular and who wasn’t. There was no scoreboard or voting system. Those people just had a way about them (cool, cavalier, confident) that made everyone else want to follow.

Social media is the ultimate popularity contest. We’re now officially living high school throughout our lives. We post only the cutest pics, engage in the newest memes, and jump on the trending hashtags, and boy, are we funny (when we have hours to think and rethink our comments/posts).

Popularity measurement on social

On social, we used to measure popularity by numbers of followers. Then, in an act of popularity desperation, people/brands starting buying followers (I think we’ve all acted in popularity desperation at one point in our lives). But, when people bought followers, everyone had millions of followers, and most of those were bots. Now, the number of followers you have doesn’t matter. Anyone can buy followers. That’s not true popularity.

Engagement is the current measurement of popularity. Mostly, likes (reactions) and comments. Scrolling through social, you can quickly see which posts are popular or not. Does that sway you? Are you more likely to engage with a post if it has more reactions? Or, do you scoff at a post that gets very few reactions and think “nice try, dude”? 

Me no likey

Well, Facebook and Instagram want to remove that bias from your feed by removing reaction count. Only the poster will see the total. The social media behemoth thinks (if companies could think) that removing the popularity measurement, posters will not post for likes’ sake and rather post more unique, original content.

So, the ultimate comparison platforms want to reduce comparison and encourage originality. For someone who’d rather high school ended at 18, I think this is a valiant effort, but in a trophies for everyone sort of way. But, if the result is unique and informative content and less of the same exact same meme used in a million different ways, I’ll be elated. 

I’d like to see a content publishing platform (social media) that rewards and celebrates original content. Who knows? Maybe this could be a huge culture shift that could bring about more original content in other creative industries music and movies. It may impact the popularity contests in schools (one could hope).

What do you think? Are like/reaction counts validation for you/your brand? Do you compare the numbers of likes you get with your competitors? Does this affect the types of content you publish? Do you think this change will change the way you post in the future?

Change is good and I, for one, am hopeful with this one.