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Humans love it give value to things: the price of a gallon of milk ($ 3.55), the merit of a film (89 percent of Rotten Tomatoes), the value of an hour’s work (at least $ 15 in California). Some things are priceless — the look people give each other on their wedding day or the memory of a great holiday — but we still value those moments on social media by quantifying them in “likes”. It costs nothing to touch the square image twice in your Instagram feed, but the action has a currency. The value of a message, a video, or even an entire profile, how many times was seen and enjoyed.
They have been social media moguls twisting their hands about the incentives that products generate over the years. Do likes encourage young people to compare themselves to celebrities and friends, damaging their self-esteem? Do they encourage messages that are more inflammatory or sexual than people can do otherwise? Are bot farms and coordinated campaigns too easy to manipulate? Lots of important platforms they have tested these metrics are hidden or underestimated, but they remain stubborn in our digital lives.
Instagram leader Adam Mosseri is the last person in charge who decides that it doesn’t make sense to like him. People as to like. Needless to say, a a billion-dollar economy agents and brands. Like after the removal experiences, Instagram this week he announced the option will be left to the users. I like that the accounts will be visible in the default way, but if people want to choose not to see them in their sources and in their photos.
Here’s my recommendation: hide your favorites.
I undo it first In 2019, a few months before Instagram announced its initial experiment. I used a Jerry-rigged one browser extension which hid the metrics where Instagram and Twitter would go. The experience was actually disorienting. My eyes automatically crawled on the ones I liked as I scrolled through the feeds as if they were looking for the prices of the items I wanted to buy. I sent it to the main feed and then instinctively refreshed it to check how it was received.
I found that while I was interacting with publications I was constantly seeking the approval of others. Ben Grosser, when he developed the demounting extension, told me that it was normal then: “We relied on numbers, so we left them in a way that made more sense than them.” With the extension of the browser, he suggested that I start to lose old habits. I had nothing to lose, but I had to like it.
Eventually, I relaxed in this narrated experience. I liked posts less about it and more about sharing updates from my life with friends. Walking from Instagram to walking was like walking into a museum: I stayed in the posts I liked, not wanting to check the price of their sticker. Grosser doesn’t make demeters for Twitter and Instagram apps, but I still keep his extensions installed on my laptop. In a worthless world, I could finally be free.
Since I first experimented with demounting, a lot has been said about how being disliked distorts our behavior online. In the documentary False Famous, Journalist Nick Bilton artificially inflated the follower and the number of three actors who wanted to, and found that he was overwhelmed and absorbed in trying to get more. These agents knew that their likes were fake; Bilton bought them at a bot farm to squeeze in the engagement numbers. Still, the excitement of liking him turned him into people he didn’t know as his real friends and family.
What are they doing, then, that they like with the rest? Researchers are divided on whether digital engagement affects mental health; answer, as proposed in a final study, it may be too early to tell. But still, following the metrics can affect (or not) what we post online. “When visible interface metrics are hidden, users realize how much their presence has driven their actions almost automated,” says Grosser, who has studied demounting for more than a decade. People do things for the gram, and not for them.
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