Big Smile, No Teeth: We're all slaves to the likes

Humans have a bad history of creating systems and then making themselves slaves to that system. If a system brings out the worst in us, maybe we should rethink how much time we spend using it. Photo: 123rf.com

Big news this week in seemingly silly changes to your favourite social media platform: Instagram from Facebook (are they still going with that name change?) has stopped showing how many likes any post has. Now each post tells you one or two of your followers that has liked the post and then states “and others”, which is pretty vague. It almost makes you wonder if there’s any point in showing two random people who have liked the post at all.

Of course, users can still see how many likes they’ve got in their “insights” but it’s no longer displayed for all to see. Instagram has done this to create a “less stressful experience”. Big shrug.