Instagram mistakenly removes likes count, turns out to be a disaster
Instagram accidentally removed the ‘likes’ count from a number of accounts while conducting a test that went wrong.
It had been conducting a test to hide likes on posts in order to provide a new experience to its users, reported the company when the update rolled out more extensively than anticipated.
Later on Tuesday, users started reporting about being unable to see the likes count on people’s posts. Rather, they were able to see the person’s name who had liked it and the message “others” had liked it too. But, they couldn’t see how many of those others were.
“We unintentionally added more people to the test today, which was a bug – we’re fixing the issue and restoring like counts to those people as soon as possible,” tweeted Instagram’s communications team.
“So Instagram …did not mean to hide likes for everyone,” the official account said in another post, along with an awkward emoticon.
Later on, Instagram confirmed that the issue had been fixed and the likes count should be restored. They added that the users might need to refresh their application by pulling down on the feed to restore it back.
Instagram has been testing the possibility (of removing the likes count) since 2019. They made this decision amidst the worries that the metrics were causing unhappiness among its users, who might feel demotivated and sad that they are unable to achieve as much engagement as they hoped for.
Advertisement
In the test, people will not be able to see the likes count other’s post had received. They would still be able to view how many likes their own posts had received. Users would also be able to see a full list of everyone who had liked the post, but not the total count of people who had done so.
Instagram has not given any timeline as to when it will roll out this feature but, has been evidently testing it and adding more people to it as time goes on.