Instagram starts hiding post likes: This is what users in Brussels think about it.

New Instagram policy is the top story globally in recent days – the social media platform started hiding the like counts on user’s posts so that only owners of the post can see how many likes their photo received. The goal is to remove competition and help people to focus on the content and not number of likes. We asked our Brussels instagram community what they think about this decision.

Instagram announced that:

“While the feedback from early testing in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand has been positive, this is a fundamental change to Instagram, and so we’re continuing our test to learn more from our global community.” 

We asked our large instagram community in Brussels (40.000 people follow our page) what do they think about this change. More than 500 people participated in the poll. The answer – an overwhelming majority of 68% thinks that this is a good decision while 32% thinks it is bad.

Finally, this is what Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has to say about the impact of removing likes count from Instagram:

Our interest in hiding likes really is just to depressurize Instagram for young people. It’ll likely effect how much some people engage on Instagram, probably liking a bit less and posting a bit more, but the main thing we’re trying to learn is how this effects how people feel.