Facebook wants to hide Likes under posts

Facebook is considering hiding the number of Likes in the app and site from users. They would instead only see a few friends who also like a post. Facebook wants to make messages more objective for users.

The first to discover that was Jane Wong, a reverse engineer who regularly discovers new things in the Facebook app. She previously found out that Instagram made likes invisible. Facebook now confirms to TechCrunch that it is also experimenting with this in the Facebook app.

In the experiment, the number of Likes is hidden under a post. The number of other reactions via the emotions that Facebook added since last year are no longer shown directly in the timeline. On the other hand, they see any number of friends who have liked them, but not how many. You can also see how many readers have left a comment or shared a message. Users who click on the message will still see how many likes it has.

According to Facebook, the company hides the likes so that users don’t drive themselves crazy because their posts are not nice enough. It would also happen that users delete their message if it does not get enough likes, or that they no longer even post on the network at all. The company does not yet say whether this is evident from the results of the Instagram test that is now running among users. As far as we know, the test at Facebook is not yet carried out among users, but according to Facebook, it should be done soon.