FOR so many people, Instagram is everything. In 2017, the #StatusOfMind survey, published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health, included input from 1,479 young people (ages 14 to 24) from across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The period covered was February through May of 2017.
The poll asked respondents to score the most popular social- media apps on 14 concerns including anxiety, depression, loneliness, bullying and body image. Out of a list that included Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the respondents rated Instagram the worst. Is that surprising? Not really.
The survey said Instagram was associated with anxiety, depression, bullying and FOMO. Not surprisingly, the respondents gave video-sharing platform YouTube a net positive score.
Anyway, back to Instagram: people have made a living out of being “Instagrammers.” These days, you need a blog or a YouTube channel to get freebies and invites to exclusive events. You just need an account with 10,000 followers and you’re set.
Instagrammers can charge from P5,000 to attend an event and post about it on the photo-sharing site. Some can charge up to P200,000. It really is all about follows and likes.
But these follows and likes can be purchased and while I have nothing against those who do it, I empathize with those who do it fair and square, and aren’t as successful as others.
But a recent development can potentially change that. Instagram may soon hide like counts on posts to reduce the sense of competition among users. Jane Manchun Wong discovered this in the code of Instagram’s Android app.
“We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this test, only the person who shared a post will see the total number of likes it gets,” a screenshot of the code revealed. If plans push through, the total like count will be removed and there will be a link to “View Likes.” Clicking this link will let the user see the total number of likes a post has and the users who have liked it. Other users will not see that information but they can see when other users they follow like particular posts, just like before.
In this day of curated feeds and even more curated following lists, this development could bring back the good old days when posts were more organic. Instagram has yet to confirm whether this is true but in my opinion, it seems like a healthy move.