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What Instagram really learned from hiding like counts
by
Courtland Allen
https://www.platformer.news/p/instagrams-big-likes-anticlimax
I'm skeptical this experiment ever could've worked. Instagram was never going to shoot itself in the foot and remove a feature that contributed heavily to user retention. So if retention numbers dropped, I suspect they would've just buried this experiment and never talked about it again.
Going further, what are the chances that retention wouldn't be affected, but that removing likes would somehow improve the "health" of IG users who are addicted? Pretty much zero. If you're addicted, you're addicted. This would just mean the likes aren't to blame for the addiction. So all the possible options were:
So there was no end result where IG got rid of likes.
Yes, I was also skeptical from the get-go.
About the articles which say social media is not linked to depression - while I can't access the first article, the one from forbes pretty much says "we don't have sufficient data yet".
My take on this "experiment" is this - clearly, Zucky won't publish the real data that made them turn likes back on.
Since it's clear they really don't care about their users (just look at their privacy policies), that can only mean that likes being turned off somehow hurts their bottom line. Of course they can't say that publicly, so they will come up with some bull**** story that will "validate" their decision.
Yup, sue these studies who say social media is not linked to depression. It is no brainer to know what is truth.
This is a really good point. Whenever an experiment is done, in order to be meaningful, should be done by an impartial third-party, not by someone who has something to gain or lose based on the results. You can always tweak an experiment or filter the data in order to get the numbers you want.
It's disappointing, but yeah. When you look at this way, it's hard to see how they could have done any differently.
LOL
test