This is akin to the ability to "de-badge" a car, offered by German manufacturers, where the manufacturer logo is visible but the specific model is not. I.e. a Mercedes SL could be a $80,000 V6 or a $160,000 twin-turbo V12 and unless someone was clued into the differences (like the exhaust pipes) they wouldn't know.

I've noticed anecdotally that in the US, most of the de-badged cars are the low end models -- people don't want to be known as driving the cheapest end of the range. In Northern Europe, the de-badged cars are generally the highest end models. Wonder if there's a deeper learning to be found there.

The whole indirect signalling of cars is very interesting.

In my country (North/Eastern Europe) you pay more (€500-€2000) for a license plate that has certain combinations of numbers such as 123 or 747. I've noticed that pretty much every Porsche has a plate like that. It's kind of silly, because people who have no clue that exists won't care at all. You can also go full on custom plates, the funniest I saw recently was someone who had H0DL... on a Toyota RAV4 :D I guess the plate cost 20% the price of the car.

I used to live in a Middle Eastern country where the plates were simply Latin numbers, combinations didn't matter, but if you wanted a shorter plate you had to pay more. If you had a 1 or 2 character plate (which is at least $500k) supposedly girls would just leave their phone numbers on your car, regardless of what car you had.

We call "latin" numbers "arabic" in English, because Europe received them from the Maghreb. "Latin numbers" is actually closer to "Roman numerals," what we call the old Latin system (V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, &c)

>Wonder if there's a deeper learning to be found there.

Yes, Europe generally has Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Nordics have socially accepted norms like Jantelagen.

- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191008-jantelagen-why...

Do people in the US really talk about how much they earn? I had the impression that doing so was socially awkward.

They do, and in circles where doing it is gauche, the signal it through other means. The more elite you are, the more indirectly you signal it.

> The more elite you are, the more indirectly you signal it.

I don't see how that's so different from de-badging the highest end car models then. People can still see its expensive, it's just more indirect.

Larry David's 'The Anonymous Donor' on Curb Your Enthusiasm exposes this masterfully https://curb-your-enthusiasm.fandom.com/wiki/The_Anonymous_D...

One idea why:

In the US cars are perhaps more of a status symbol? (not that they arnt elsewhere...)

So people remove the badges themselves from their cars.

Maybe the Europeans like a simpler design aestehtic? I checked and it's a no cost option to debadge your Porsche when you order it.

I say this as a European living in Australia, and my tastes in cars are different to my friends in all the ways you would expect!

I like Porsche, and have a 911. My Aussie mates like big V8s!

(who doesnt like a V8, but you get what I mean!)

And please no one get offended by my generalisations. Take it in the spirit intended :-)

Funny, I always thought people did that for aesthetic reasons because they liked the cleaner look.

That's certainly part of it, and if I was going to buy a car at the SL level I'd probably debadge regardless of the trim level. But I'm sure there are people on one end of the spectrum who don't want to advertise their $150-200k car, and people on the other end who want to make others think it's a $150-200k car.

> Wonder if there's a deeper learning to be found there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

In Ireland/UK any debadged cars are in the boy racer scene, I always found it interesting that without the badges it can be difficult to distinguish the make if the car.

I see that a lot in America as well. Very typical on modded Subarus and Infinitis.

I debadge a lot of products. That said, I would really like to own a red ~1980 Ferrari 308 GTS, including all the emblems, even if it's actually a Prius under the hood.

Funny you say that. We have a lot of $100k+ debadged cars in Switzerland, and I never even noticed until my Kiwi friend started pointing it out.

Here in Germany, I know some people debadged their cars so they wouldn't get stolen so quickly.

Even with positive intentions, I'm not convinced this will solve the problem in any meaningful way. Turning off likes might be perceived as someone being unhappy with their social media status relative to their peers (ie, not getting as many 'likes' as their friends), which signals its own stigma.

Users will be forced into a new dilemma: Enable likes and accept the 'social media pressure', or announce to everyone that they harbor some sort of insecurity about their social media status by turning them off.

I'm not a social media user, but I'm actually considering to start using Instagram with this feature.

Disabling likes doesn't show that I harbor insecurity, it simply removes the 'rat race' feeling that I have with social media. (which was the reason why I stopped using it a couple years ago).

I use Instagram but I don’t bother checking like counts or the list of who liked a post. You have to go out of your way to look for this information anyway.

I suppose disabling the feature could help those who can’t resist the impulse to check and who get upset if they don’t see the expected number of likes. It’s more of a forced self-control option.

I have known people who struggle with phone and social media addiction, but I have to say that the HN caricature of Instagram is nothing like my experience or that of anyone I know. Instagram has been great for keeping up with photos of friends’ hobbies, travels, kids, and other fun things to share. I suppose if someone felt significant jealousy or insecurity at other’s success or happiness then it could be stressful to see it presented so conveniently, but that’s more of a personal issue than an Instagram issue. If you stay in touch with people you’re going to hear about their kids, vacations, new house and new cars eventually anyway.

The real problem I’ve seen is addiction to scrolling through the discover page. I can see all of my friends’ updates on Instagram in 5-10 minutes per day at most. However, someone scrolling the discover page could waste endless hours consuming random content that has nothing to do with their social network.

I’d suspect the warping of mental health might be primarily concentrated in younger people?

You probably don’t make it to 35, get all established in life, then Instagram tanks your whole sense of self worth.

Seems more plausible you’d be growing up, trying to find your place in the world, head on Instagram and get depressed cause it seems like everyone’s lifestyles are just so much better than yours.

It's a little weird to blame the users in the same post that explains how the app is designed to distract you from the healthy usage you advocate.

I use Twitter and Instagram, and occasionally comment on Reddit. I don't bother to check the like/follow numbers on any of them.

İt doesnt disable likes, it hides them.

It's almost as if the company that runs Instagram wants you to feel like they are truly, honestly, really, properly interested in losing the core of their business for the sake of your own mental health and the psychological wellbeing of society in general

TikTok just makes up the view counts. So everyone feels like they're growing an audience. Instagram could do the same. They probably will. It would probably both increase engagement and, would it be bad for mental health?

Anyway, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts 5 years ago.

Where is your source that TikTok makes up the view counts. As a developer myself, their interest graph is second to none. It has by far the best recommendation algorithm in the social media space to date. Of course they are doing it with all the data they collect, but it doesn't bother me because it shows me endless amounts of the type of content I want to see, which is not half-naked dancing teens, but lots of political commentary and real life stories.

Facebook also made up view counts on video. What can I say? What evidence do you have the counts are real?

If you’re going to make a claim against what a reasonable person would expect, the burden of proof is on you to support your claim. You said tik tok like counts aren’t real and someone asked you for source. Then, rather than giving a source, you made another unsupported claim about Facebook doing the same thing. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other, but I do enjoy reading HN for lively conversation and debate. I’d prefer the debate to be in good spirit and based on fact, not conjecture.

So you’re saying some random person on the internet has a higher burden of proof than a $55b company. In the pursuit of intellectual honesty, it also seems reasonable that for once some giant bullshit claim from a company is audited?

OTOH, now that disabling likes is an option, we can form a cultural norm that enabling likes on your post is a shame-worthy, petty, insecure, attention-seeking behavior.

who is we? and why would the typical social media user care what "we" think?

Precisely because the average social media user is petty, insecure, and attention-seeking. Like shaming is a fabulous concept I for one could get behind. Next up do follows, replies and retweets, and eventually people might slowly begin to measure social proof for themselves once more.

Can you imagine Donald Trump's twitter account with all those idiotic metrics scrubbed from it? It would have been a beautiful sight, just an angry old man typing in caps to himself

I doubt that such stigma will be very widespread. There's been a renewed focus within the society to focus on digital well-being, screen time, and general mental wellness connected to the overuse of social media platforms and smartphones. People will try this feature just out of curiosity, and be able to tell their peers about non-social standing related reasons for why it's useful.

Or, to be more precise, inversely proportional to age

When they were testing this in Ireland over the last year, there was no option to see likes at all. That probably makes more sense than this.

I enjoyed that, it was quite a bit nicer.

Up until recently, that was the case for my IG account as well. I'm based in the US.

> Users will be forced into a new dilemma: Enable likes and accept the 'social media pressure', or announce to everyone that they harbor some sort of insecurity about their social media status by turning them off.

Isn't that just for your own view? Others will still see the likes I'm assuming?

It appears that this setting controls cross-account like visibility on posts:

"Even if a user has Like Counts enabled, they will not be able to see the number of likes on accounts or posts that have hidden them."

Sounds like the perfect solution if you want to say "we are releasing features that support a healthy usage of the our app", and at the same time make sure no one uses these features!

FWIW Casey Newton posted a writeup- they ran trials for a couple years and the response was polarized (some loved it, some hated it) and they couldn’t find any clear indicator that it was healthier for people.

I disagree. I have my strava runs set to private because I've found the dynamic of others liking my runs affecting my thinking. I've also entirely disabled my Facebook wall. I don't have Instagram, but I would enable this immediately if I ever were to join.

Instagram should allow users to simply set the number of likes to whatever they want to have displayed, and let it increment from there.

If Instagram is letting people turn the feature off, then it's likely that they don't actually need "likes" for their data-collection purposes.

>they don't actually need "likes" for their data-collection purposes.

Is that what's happening? My understanding is that you can hide the displaying of the likes, but still allow people to like them. In that case, the metrics are still being collected.

They still allow users to like. However, you might be right that they don't really need it. They have engagement metrics based on your scrolling behavior.

Idk, I disable my friend count on facebook. I have 600, so not shame worthy, just fairly average. It's just unnecessary information. I think many like to the ability to not be "looked down on" by the >2000 crowd, and not "embarrass" the <100 crowd.

What the hell? What a meaningless metric by which to judge others or one's self. Facebook friends are cheap. I can send out 10,000 requests right now (~2 hours without writing a script, ~20 minutes with, assuming no rate limiting) and several thousand complete strangers will blindly accept.

I had no idea there were people out there who felt so strongly about this (not implying that you do, of course). If anything, I worry about people in the >2,000 crowd for practicing poor privacy hygiene given that the likelihood of truly knowing that many people is low and people share a lot of information on Facebook.

Reminds me a bit of Tinder Gold "hide my age" feature. Everyone has their age shown unless you pay extra to hide it, so hiding almost always will look worse than your actual age.

I just set an absurdly older age, while keeping my age filter the same. The 23 year olds actually looking for that can be amused and interested.

But since I said something now I guess I’ll have to pivot to something else.

In Japan, tinder verifies your age

It's the same thing as YouTube videos with comments disabled. "What are they hiding from?" becomes the question.

Also the comments are a big indicator of social media clout.

This is why the feature was introduced. Just a gesture.

In my view this is Instagram providing platitudes in an attempt get ahead of a growing consensus that social media is bad for people and society overall

The harm inflicted by social media is infinitely more complex and sinister than a simple count of likes on posts.

I'll give it another 5 years before social media is viewed on the same level as cigarettes. The best thing I've ever done for my mental health was deleting social media. I realize I'm not significant enough to argue of other people about my own life. As long as you're not harming anyone else you're free to do whatever you want. Social media says no you have to shape your entire life around what people you'll never meet find cool.

I stopped begging for approval from the masses, I stopped going to Reddit to get "advice" from people who only seek to chastise me.

And now you hang out at HN which is totally different from social media. Where people never seek approval from the masses. Chastising other people as a concept does not exist on HN.

HN, the not-social media, does not even have a concept of likes.

But you're not chastising me, or my physical appearance. Having people call you ugly all day is probably one of the worst parts of Instagram.

You're merely chastising a few of my opinions. There's so much detachment from the rest of me.

In the early days of Facebook I actually screwed up a relationship as I was worried my first girlfriend would post the wrong thing on my wall, and oh no all my friends would see.

Hacker News isn't really a social media site since there's no concept of followers or friends here.

If in any case you decide to go through my post history to make fun of me, I can just create a new handle. I can do this without even adding an email address.

> Having people call you ugly all day is probably one of the worst parts of Instagram.

That’s not at all typical for Instagram. In fact, anyone being called “ugly” would do well to block whoever is making those comments, which is very easy on the platform.

> Hacker News isn't really a social media site since there's no concept of followers or friends here.

Hacker News is absolutely a social media. The comments section is all about social discussion and we have upvotes and downvotes.

You may like it more than other forms of social media because it lacks pictures, allows usernames instead of real names, and replaces likes with upvotes (and downvotes, arguably more toxic than likes). However, it’s still social media.

Upvotes and downvotes on HN only give you hint about the popularity (or lack thereof) of the views that you have expressed as an anonymous commentator. This can never be interpreted as a popularity rating of your physical appearance, lifestyle or of your worth as a human being, whereas in other social media this is often the case.

I disagree with the part on the ugly comments. It is very typical and blocking every single nasty comment on your appearance can be a mentally taxing effort that you can’t quite put under a « just block them off it’s easy » assertion.

> Hacker News isn't really a social media site since there's no concept of followers or friends here.

I'm not sure that matters all that much, it's just one way of doing things.

Would HackerNews be a different beast if it gave you the option of viewing the most recent 40 comments from your 10 favourite commenters? I don't think so. Someone could even build this as a third-party UI if they wanted to.

> If in any case you decide to go through my post history to make fun of me, I can just create a new handle.

HackerNews is well moderated. I imagine the mods would view that kind of thing as harassment and put a stop to it, especially if you contacted them about it.

For my part, HN is the only thing like social media I still use. (Though I'm deliberately not counting things like irc and discord.) And now that I've been off social media long enough for my baselines to shift, I'm realizing I have some similar problems here, too. There's a difference in magnitude, of course, but not so much in form.

So, yeah, you're absolutely right. And lately I've been actively considering canceling my subscription and spending more time just reading books.

> HN, the not-social media, does not even have a concept of likes.

Call em what you want, but upvotes/downvotes are in the same sphere as likes. Being downvoted into oblivion has the same mental effect as no likes or dislikes on other platforms, despite not being a 1:1 algorithm (1 upvote on HN does not necessarily equate to +1 in your karma) and even if you're the only one that can see them.

I think the person you're replying to may have been sarcastic in their comment because all those things they mentioned do exist in some form on HN.

Without those things, HN would not have the same allure as it does now. Of course upvotes/downvotes are a core part of HN; they even have a leaderboard. At least one particular "eccentric" character tends to boast about being on it as if it's a status symbol (which it may very well be, particularly if you're frequent on HN).

One advantage with HN over reddit is that buffoonery is generally not rewarded.

I think HN is actually worse, as the "approval" you get here is ostensibly from peers and folks that one may think are "just like them". It's easy to brush off not being approved by random Karen's on Facebook but far harder to accept PG or someone like him calling you a loser...

I'd be a bit honored if a billionaire took the time to insult me.

Most successful people tend to be a bit above that.

I enjoy HN since the discourse here tends to be fairly intelligent. I've already gained a great deal of very valuable information from this site

This is the only social media I use anymore and while I still may drop it, and while I still do occasionally check my karma after posting, it’s easily the most rewarding social media experience I’ve dealt with given the concentration of talent; and the emphasis on quality, interesting content.

You’re not wrong of course, but it feels a bit exaggerated.

I get that HN is still social media, but the level of sludge here is at least an order of magnitude less than general reddit, and probably way better than twitter (I could never get into twitter despite trying my best).

To me HN is the final hold out of the old social news sphere. Geeky computer nerds with inflated egos having (mostly) geeky computer nerd discussions. That doesn't sound like much, but at least the average IQ is higher than room temperature and knowledgeable discussion is more popular than puns.

The way scoring works on HN is importantly different though. Highly downvoted comments get greyed, but when a comment is highly upvoted, only the author sees. I can't see what your highest-scoring comments are.

There's also a publicly visible total karma associated with each account, but it's not displayed prominently.

I don't think submission scoring is particularly problematic.

Yep, same boat here. Deleted FB/Insta and avoiding altogether as it made me incredibly anxious.

Still lurk on Reddit but no account there so I can't wade in to the comments.

HN is the only forum I actively participate in.

I recently created a Twitter account after ignoring the platform for years. I'm pretty well known and have had several significant presences online, but I didn't try to leverage any of that and wanted to see if the network had matured to the point that it is decaying (where it is just cemented into a core).

I commented on various tweets. Left thoughtful tweets of my own on a variety of topics. Zero political tweets, but rather participated in the tech sphere including some niche realms.

Zero engagement after months. I realized later that some of my comments were hidden under "see more" for other users -- even where I added a helpful comment to a person who themselves had double-digit followers, and where there were only a tiny handful of other comments. My tweets would get hundreds of views (maybe all scrapers), but no one is going to be the first to like some comment by some tiny account with a handful of "followers". So it sits there in Pathetic Valley.

It's the curse of social networks. They get their long tail cemented in and pretty soon it's better for everyone else to wait for it to die and join something new. I deleted my twitter account and moved on. When Twitter's replacement comes along I'll get in on day one, copy some jokes some other people make and leave trite cynical comments and by month 2 I'll be a superstar.

I feel like Instagram might be taking a stab at dealing with that, rather than some concern over mental health. When everyone new faces Pathetic Valley (unless they're going to buy followers, or go on a desperate campaign outside of the platform to foment engagement), it's the inevitable decline of the platform.

Screw that - don't let the people on the Internet live rent free in your head. You don't have to post to prove anything.

You don't, but depending on your age, it certainly can help. Sometimes being a socialite can do more for you than just caring about money and privacy.

It requires a very high amount of naiveness to think this could solve the issue. Only thing that will help is education of children, so that they understand their place in the world, to accept themselves, that the aesthetic standards provided in social networks are very high (but yet, as a central European my sensibility is a bit different than the one in other places -- I would suggest that this must be a stimulus to avoid gaining weight, to train, and so forth), that random appreciation in terms of "likes" is not a sensible measure of how much a person is worth, and so forth.

I doubt that the only thing that will help is education. Education cannot win over something where other, more educated people are putting full-time careers in psychological hijacking of children. A 12 year old doesn't stand a chance no matter how much they accept themselves.

This stuff needs to be regulated like cigarettes.

I don't agree because the contact with real teenagers at school and other places where children meet was as brutal as it is today even in the past. Now there are new elements, that is, the fact you have to confront yourself with a lager audience of people and you can see unreal standards. But even at school with 400 children there will be the extremely pretty, the extremely good at sports, and so forth. And what is likes in social networks, in the real world translates to certain folks getting all the attention and other being regarded as trash. I think that certain problems that are embedded in being humans in a modern society are now all attributed to social networks, but this is not the case. Similarly people already used to vote for crazy folks: we in Italy had Berlusconi in '90s. Before there was Hitler and Mussolini. Similarly to think that US got Trump because social networks is a simplification that fails to capture reality.

> Now there are new elements, that is, the fact you have to confront yourself with a lager audience of people and you can see unreal standards.

You nailed it here. Social media heavily rewards extreme outliers.

School bullying is bad, but scaling it up to global bullying is worse.

Also you bullied teens can get potential help from late bloomers who were bullied in early years; thus, placing the bully in from of their moronic supporters as a big loser.

I agree. SM operates on a subconscious level by exploiting all kinds of cognitive biases. Rational thinking won't solve this issue for the majority

You must have missed it, the article itself says its not going to solve the problem.

>In its testing and research, Instagram said that removing likes had little impact on behaviour or wellbeing - after concerns that using the platform could be linked to insecurity and poor mental health.

>Despite this, Mr Mosseri said Instagram - which is owned by Facebook - introduced the feature to make “people feel good about the time they spend” on the platform. “I do think there’s more to do in this space,” he added. “The more we can give people the ability to shape Instagram and Facebook into what's good for them, the better.”

My comment was referring to the feature itself, I see that the article kinda try to put the things in perspective, but not as strongly and sharply I think should be done.

Ah okay, your comment sounded like someone claimed it would fix the problem - but the article didn't say that - so I don't quite know who you were referring to!! In any case, no biggie. :)

It's not just children that are negatively affected by these apps. It's everyone. The only way not to be affected is to not use them.

I don't feel negatively affected by Instagram. I like to see pictures of my family. All of the female members of my family (who are old enough) have accounts to comment even if they don't post. I consider it lucky there is a free photo sharing solution that everyone has landed on.

What do you all see on your explore tab?

The only winning move is not to play

I wonder if that education should also explicitly include how likes, ads and attention are correlated. Making them understand their place in the world is good but SM is a different take on that age-old problem.

Have the kids make a post to see who can get the most likes over a week, the teacher does a lame one as well ("read books this summer!"). Nobody likes the teachers post, until the last day when teacher buys 1000 likes for the post, blowing everyone away for $5.

Now the kids know its all made up and the points don't matter.

Depending on the age of the kids, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the kids had bought likes, too.

Welcome to whose like is it anyway - the show where everything is made up and the points don't matter

> Now the kids know its all made up and the points don't matter.

Careful, they might start questioning whether standardized testing can be gamed as well.

That will be a fantastic outcome.

Honestly given the way I've heard teachers feel about those, good.

> that random appreciation in terms of "likes" is not a sensible measure of how much a person is worth

I suspect many of the so called 'influencer' accounts buy likes and followers. A quick Google for 'buy instagram followers' leads you down a rabbithole of merchants willing to sell you followers and likes. The thing to notice is: when you've gained traction and are over 10,000 followers, the followers that you do buy, become un-noticeable, because there's so much noise on the platform (no-one notices).

This is why new accounts that suddenly have 1000 followers in 7 days is a red flag.

> called 'influencer' accounts buy likes and followers

An entire cottage industry exists of boutique firms that specialize in creating bullshit content for influencers. You can see it in spades when you look at "Tagged" photos, and see fan accounts for people with 10k followers with video and image collages. There's also the big "agencies" that rep larger influencers that practice the same tactics, maybe with just a little more finesse.

It seems silly, but I think this could actually be helpful for some people. I have my upvotes hidden on reddit because I found myself regularly checking the site after I would post, just to see if the number of upvotes I received had increased. It's not like it was making me feel pressure or depressed if a post didn't get votes, but it felt the same way video games feel when you try to get a high score. Hiding the vote count made it so I don't get distracted by the feeling of wanting to see if my "score" is going up.

How do you do that? I see an option in my Reddit preferences to "make my votes public," but it doesn't seem like this hides votes on my own posts from me.

Maybe a part of RES? https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Instagram can actually be a nice place, if used as a platform to look at cool pictures and not at all as a social network. I never added any friends or family, I just follow accounts and topics I'm interested in. So my feed is almost entirely pixel art, cool architecture, and retro console mods, and it's very pleasant.

Considering they're Facebook-owned, I see surprisingly little effort to cram low-effort garbage down my throat. I've even bought a couple of things via ads, as they seem to be pretty aligned with my interests (as you would expect from that level of data collection).

The only real issue I've had is that a weirdly large number of people seem to tag their family photos with the #architecture hashtag.

I think there are a few different modes that people use it in (and I'm sure the folks at Instagram have this down to a more precise science):

* Consumer-only: simply following artists/whatever and not contributing anything

* Family and friends: Sharing pictures of your holiday/kid/cat/food with people you know

* Influencers and wannabe influencers: Actively seeking to grow an audience

I don't think between 1 & 2 anyone can say one is better than the other, they're two quite different modes of using the app. Number 2 obviously can lead to people wondering why their 15th funny picture of their cat didn't get as many likes, and it's for this group that I think turning off likes altogether can help the most.

I would expect, though, that if everyone in a family-and-friends circle were turning off their likes, comments would become a proxy for likes, and there would be an expectation to add "nice!", "beautiful!" "how funny!" to posts, and then a similar feeling when posts don't get any response.

I only use Instagram to send messages to a single person who won't get back to me through text messages. We had serious issues seeing responses to each others' communication until I gave in and made an Instagram account for messaging.

But I don't believe I ought to criticize them over this. Instagram is their normal, and the place where a significant portion of their social life converges, and I never had any control over that from the beginning. Facebook did.

When I see them in real life, our interactions are positive, so I really believe our usage of Instagram is simply what works out the most practically for them. I don't use Instagram for any other purpose. But because of the network effect, I can easily see how Instagram can redirect the attention of other people this way, and make the app their new normal, repeating the vicious cycle.

Mind you, your being on Instagram, via the network effect, makes the platform more valuable and attractive to other users, such as your friend or other people who know you.

If you delete your account, Instagram becomes less useful to your bad-at-SMS friend.

The problem I see with this is that, to my friend, choosing to delete my Instagram account indicates that my principles for social media are more valuable than our friendship. In my case, the friendship wins out.

Irrespective of whether or not I choose to be on Instagram, they want to have an audience they will post for. They choose to play the social media game where I don't. That is their decision. In my mind, judging them based on the value of that decision sounds petty to me, and is probably futile. I do not think that imposing my morals on anyone who disagrees with me is the right option, and our attempts at moving the conversation off the platform have not succeeded anyway. If that's the platforms' defense mechanism, that making the users believe the networks are beneficial for them shuts out opinions to the contrary, then so be it.

I could think, "but if they were a true friend, they would put up with the inconveniences caused by interacting outside Instagram." I want to believe this is true, but I don't think how my friend spends their time or what platform they're motivated to use is a major indicator of the quality of our friendship. Legitimate best friends can still have Instagram accounts, the same as the "friends in name only" the networks would define. And if by this definition we are not actually true friends, then maybe that's a valid statement on my ability to find and maintain the correct friendships, or maybe it's just excess paranoia.

Also, they are the only person I've felt comfortable talking to, and they aren't part of a compensated or therapeutic relationship. That relationship is the value that Facebook supposedly holds. That is what they lend out to me when I ask for it.

And this is the very mechanism which Facebook uses to capture so many people's attention. I can go on and on over how I believe that social media is a net negative on society, and how it destroys my attention span if I give its other features enough credence, and yet I still have to use Instagram to have a chance at interacting with this person who has legitimately made a significant impact on my life elsewhere.

About all I can ask is what would incentivize them to stop using the platform if their usage has not reached pathological or mentally damaging levels, and I don't have an answer to that question.

> I could think, "but if they were a true friend, they would put up with the inconveniences caused by interacting outside Instagram." I want to believe this is true, but I don't think how my friend spends their time or what platform they're motivated to use is a major indicator of the quality of our friendship.

If they were a true friend, they wouldn't subject your 1-on-1 friend communications to constant Zuckerberg surveillance and censorship. There are links that Facebook has decided that you're not allowed to send to or recieve from that "friend". Any serious conversation about real shit that matters (life, death, the universe, hopes, dreams) is going to be logged for all time and turned over to the cops whenever for the asking.

That's not how friendship works. That's the same as telling a friend a secret and them writing it down and mailing it to a third party.

> The only real issue I've had is that a weirdly large number of people seem to tag their family photos with the #architecture hashtag.

Because for most people hasthags are a way of getting people to view their picture than to label the content

Same.

On IG, I follow a minimal number of family/friends (basically people I see in meat-space at least monthly, plus a very few childhood friends who I still see when we're in the same town). Beyond that, I follow a few cycling and car feeds.

On FB, I actively unfollwed or defriended everybody but family. 99% of my FB use today is marketplace groups and that's 2-3x week.

I've been much less stressed after making those changes. No more anxiety-porn in the feeds. No more politics. Etc. Just close friends, bicycles, and sometimes cute animals my wife forwards.

Same here, I don't seek out anyone on Instagram. I follow accounts that interest me, such as Museums, Ministry of Culture, language teachers, etc.

The Hermitage Museum, for example, posts excellent content.

When you run a Pi-Hole you see how much telemetry is being sent back with the DNS requests to many different domains.

Insane, simply for scrolling through pictures. I think it tells you a lot.

FWIW, most of what happens with the unique subdomains is done with the intention of automatically routing you to the nearest edge/pop that has the best chance of either having the asset cached, or in the best ___location for routing your request to a datacenter that can serve the asset from disk. By generating the seemingly random subdomains when serving the metadata to the client, it can most efficiently fetch the media to be displayed. It's entirely possible (likely?) that multiple users in the same ISP/___location to be vended the same subdomain/url, but physically/topologically distant users will get different urls.

We’ve had likes on Instagram hidden in Australia, and maybe NZ for quite some time. Maybe it’s not everyone, but I know my account no longer shows likes on any posts. I was unaware it could be turned off.

I don’t really use it much now anyway, but I did like this feature. It was one less metric to be distracted by, you either thought the photo was good, or bad, rather than agreed with others or not. I prefer to make a decision for myself and then see the general opinion.

But my Instagram was 80% my friends, unlike some of my close friends who have horrible comparative relationships with people they don’t know on Instagram. And the likes analytics are big part of that.

They have since stopped using it, but I feel removing likes counts is a factor in that decision.

Instagram story rants are a whole different ball game...

Remember all the way back to 2013 when FB switched to the algo-driven Timeline instead of the Facebook wall newsfeed? A lot of people hated that update, as it fundamentally changed the user experience of FB permanently. But not me.

With Timeline, the wall post counter was no longer displayed on your profile. That had long been a source of embarrassment for me as so few people posted on my wall. It didn't matter IRL, but in college, you do feel that you're not doing something right if your page is so inactive compared to those of your peers. Was I really that uninteresting?

It was a proxy measure of my relative social popularity, and it sucked, because I had no interest in juicing these numbers. So they stayed low for years until the metric was finally hidden from view.

What I really need is a way to lock myself out of the account, especially Twitter, without suspending it. Like, disable the login for a day, but I am still on the platform. The electric fences I put up myself never work.

This is all anecdotal but I committed social media digicide a short while ago because I didn’t like how it was affecting my life.

Constantly checking for likes, feeling an urge to participate in conversations to feel like “an important voice”. I got to the point where it wasn’t just directly affecting me but also the amount of attention I was giving my kids had dropped enough that I was mad at myself for becoming “that dad”.

I made sure the github stayed live (with some pointers towards currently supported alternatives) so that anyone relying on that (now redundant) work wouldn’t be left high and dry - other than that I just quietly took my online presence down.

I feel like I’ve lost nothing and have been much happier since.

I found myself fantasizing about social media digicide, so I went for it.

Totally worth it. You’ll know when you’re ready for it.

I do miss keeping in touch with some older friends via my FB account. There is certainly a cost.

I can see how this could weigh on some people, and everyone's situation is different, but in my case it was just slices of other people's political views and (more often than not) photos of their pets and their lunch.

In my case I just figured if I've lost touch with people over the years there's probably a reason. I don't mean that in any ill or dramatic way, and it's equally true from their side too.

I'm not sure it's that different from an amicable break-up with a partner in that you can naturally drift apart from other people and say "hey you're going that way, I'm going this way, best of luck with everything".

Honestly I thought losing connections with people I actually did have some history with and knew well many years ago was going to be the unfortunate cost of getting off of Facebook. As it turns out, not so much. Clinging too much to the past wastes the present, and life isn't that long to begin with.

That last part really hit me. Since deleting Instagram there’s definitely people I haven’t talked too but I wonder if it would’ve been beneficial to talk to them at all. Am I missing out?

You can have a "Messenger-only" FB account, which would allow you to keep in touch with said friends.

I'd still have an FB social account if I could have disabled Messenger; people insisted on messaging me there even though I'd log in like once per month. I deleted my actual FB just to get people to stop trying to contact me on Messenger, because it was impossible to turn off.

Simple solution : random password that you don’t save anywhere. Now you must rely on account recovery to log back in. If you feel more safe, you can also print it and store it in a drawer :)

As an extra step you could also redirect the relevant ___domain to `0.0.0.0` in your `/etc/hosts`.

Yeah, I've done it.

Sounds similar to the concept of 'self-exclusion' in the UK gambling industry:

https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/for-the-public/Safer-g...

Lots of young adult catholics in my area have started including social media in their list of things to practice will over (to improve well being, grow in empathy, etc.).

E.g. It has been a regular practice for the last two millennia to fast on Friday from some subset of enjoyable activity.

It’s interesting to watch ancient cultures start to contemplate social media and suggest healthy behaviors towards it, a technology that is only about a decade old.

I have to keep reminding myself that the world we live in is an infant, and social media will exist in a century, but our relationship to it will be very different than it is now.

Wow, imagine major religions eventually taking the next step to building their own official social media ecosystems, built by programmer priests.

Yeah, I like to imagine programmer monks hidden away working on assembly language for thousands of years.

Reminds me of the book Anathem (great book, tons of Catholic imagery)

That would be awesome! The catholic church certainly has the resources to do that kind of thing, and churches are already like a sort of social network, so they have a very captive audience. They are in a unique position to create a social network that doesn't need to monetize through any kind of ads or data collection, and I imagine their status as a religious organization can even get them tax breaks.

The app stay focused on Android is great for this. It blocks opening apps or websites based on a schedule. Really helped kill my endless scroll habit. I found I do the empty fridge thing with these apps. I'm sure there's others on ios too

I want this for League of Legends. Disable my account for 2 days, one week, one month etc. I don't want to lose the progress I made in the game by deleting the account completely but I also want to focus on my finals for a while.

See my answer above :)

I must've been in the testing batch because in 2019 my Instagram simply stopped telling me how many people had liked my post and I could not for the life of me figure out how to fix that.

I just checked and for the first time since I can remember I can see how many people like my posts again.

I feel like a quick notification informing me that I was part of a study would have been appropriate.

IIRC, it was a permanent change for everyone. This most recent change re-adds the ability to see counts.

I've always been able to see my like count. I've been waiting to see if it'd disappear, but it never did. I post regularly too.

> A recent Oxford Internet Institute study also found there was “little association” between social media use and mental health in teenagers.

I thought bbc used to be a credible news source. When did they stop being so?

I can’t tell if it’s the BBC or perhaps just me getting older (and wiser, or dumber depending on your perspective) but I’d say the BBC has got worse over the last 5 years or so. It’s usually not factually incorrect, but I’ve definitely noticed the story selection and emotive language choice doesn’t seem neutral to me. I can tolerate non-neutral news outlets I guess, but what I dislike is one that purports to be neutral and takes tax payer money for it.

It's the BBC that is getting dumber, not you my friend. I check in with the headlines every now and then and every time it's either government propaganda or bullshit Love Island celebrity nonsense.

Also, why are we being forced to subsidize EastEnders?

Whats the public benefit from that rubbish?

CBeebies, CBBC - cool. Public benefit makes sense.

BBC Science and Documentaries - Public benefit. Fully justifiable.

EastEnders - Pay money to make other people less intelligent or we’ll fine you.

I've never thought of EastEnders from that perspective. I don't disagree.

In theory, it could be used as a method of creating awareness and discussion of important life topics in a real life like familiar setting. And you can sort of see how they try to do that... but the need to have some new dramatic event every six weeks overshadows it.

And that’s the issue. It’s only a lifelike setting if your life is like that of a Jeremy Kyle victim (who’s lives are likely not like they are depicted at all).

Give us money against your will to pay for things you don’t agree with or we’ll take away your access to live media from everyone else too.

Now whether or not they can carry out the threats they’re notorious for or not, I’m just saying if it walks like an extortionist and quacks like an extortionist..

You're not forced to subsidize it. If you don't watch live TV or iPlayer you don't have to pay.

They'll send you threatening letters every 2 years or so saying they're going to come round your house but you just have to go on the website again and tell them you still don't watch live TV.

Why is that even necessary?

Essentially you’re guilty until you declare yourself innocent, and you need to prove innocence if the Beeb’s minions turn up at your house? What if you didn’t realize you needed the license because the rules around live broadcasts and battery-powered devices are so absurd?

People get sent to jail over this ridiculous situation while the government cheers from the sidelines.

Yeah it's extremely messed up and BBC likes to pretend it's not really responsible for it by hiding it under the guise of a "TV Licencing" body to distance itself [1]. I used to be pro-national broadcasting but honestly the quality of shows they produce has dropped so dramatically and how biased their news coverage has become I refuse to ever pay for it again.

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

Why not simply charge for the BBC?

If you want to unlock it pay X$ per month. See how many viewers are willing to pay for it. That's what Disney and Marvel did, grossing billions of dollar in the process.

I'd argue that the BBC got the study wrong. The authors state:

> "Our main goal was to investigate how associations between adolescents’ technology use and mental health had changed over time."

And conclude:

> "Although we found little evidence suggesting that technology is becoming more harmful over time, [..]"

There is no need for social media to become more harmful over time to it being bad enough already.

The title of the study (There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased) gives away the constraint really. Yes, okay it did not become worse, but it might be harmful from the beginning.

The name of the actual study is 'There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased'[1].

I also personally feel like its incorrect based on my own experience, but the OII for now says that there is 'little evidence', although 'drawing firm conclusions about changes in their associations with mental health may be premature'

[1]-https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702621994549

This seems to be some kind of mistake, yes.

Having a look at what younger relatives are doing for likes and how important recognition and appreciation by friends in social media is for them, I find it hard to believe that there's "little association" when things don't go as planned.

> Having a look at what younger relatives are doing for likes and how important recognition and appreciation by friends in social media is for them, I find it hard to believe that there's "little association" when things don't go as planned.

But...that’s how older generations have always responded to what younger people do for social approval, and older people interpreting what they see that way as a precipitous decline since their own youth is one of the oldest clichés possibly as old as civilization.

> I find it hard to believe that there's "little association" when things don't go as planned.

Maybe, but maybe that is just as true independent of digital engagement.

>But...that’s how older generations have always responded to what younger people do for social approval

That's a combination of

(a) a relatively modern myth ("It was always that way"),

(b) a cherry-picking from millenia for instances where that did happen (which wasn't "always" - many periods, even for centuries on end, had almost no change between generations regarding lifestyles. For some rural places that was even true for millenia.).

(c) from the cherry-picked cases where it did happen, ignoring the subset that it was also a totally valid criticism (e.g. in the decline of golden-era Athens or the fall of Rome, or the Weimar Republic), when the change in culture and attitudes eventually killed the community/city/republic.

> many periods, even for centuries on end, had almost no change between generations regarding lifestyles

Many of the instances where we have records of this being a recurring complaint of adults toward the youth were in those times of little apparent lifestyle change; part of that ia that the distance of our perspective probably minimizes changes that were perceived as significant in the local context, but a bigger part is that, while objective changes in lifestyle or technology can provide something to tie the complaint to, the main driver of the complaint is not the change in society but the change in the observer’s position and perspective within society.

As already written in the other comment: I find this result hard to believe because I think the offline experiences former generations had, would transer to online generations, too.

But yes, the youth is always terrible. I've read that in the Hagakure, but I think it has already been mentioned/been a "fact" in ancient Greece, too. ;-)

Young people have pretty much always optimised for the recognition and appreciation of their friends though. It’s just more visible to adults now, which is probably a good thing.

Totally, yes. Just thought about how badly I wanted to be one of the cool kids in school. Failed terribly in doing that, and I also know how terrible I felt about that.

That's why I'm wondering when the whole "seeking for appreciation"-thing has moved from real life to Instagram (kind of), are there no bad feelings, feelings of rejection and failure involved, when my new post doesn't get the likes I'm looking for?

The big difference is opportunity time. Previously you had occasional opportunities to impress your peers and evaluate their lives against yours giving you gaps to work between. Those gaps now no longer exist. The information and comparison is 24/7 and real time. I think comparisons to previous generations as being equal in goals vastly over simplifies vast differences in the landscape they operate in.

> It’s just more visible to adults now

Its always been visible to adults and has been a perennial complaint of adults about the youth.

Pixelfed (federated network similar to Instagram) made a similar move about a month ago:

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/106161269947338845

I missed the counts at first, but after a week or so I stopped noticing.

Do I understand this correctly, that you can only make likes invisible to yourself?

This seems about as useful as the "if you don't like it, just pretend it isn't there" school of moderation - namely not useful at all.

Humans are social beings and acutely aware of status indicators. A like count is a status indicator, even if a stupid one.

By hiding the count for everyone, the indicator would be removed, which I imagine could actually make some change. But if a user can only remove the count for themselves, fully knowing that everyone else is still seeing it, I don't see how anything more is archieved than putting thrm as a disadvantage and potentially causing even more anxiety.

> Do I understand this correctly, that you can only make likes invisible to yourself?

> This seems about as useful as the "if you don't like it, just pretend it isn't there" school of moderation - namely not useful at all.

But a feature like that makes "pretending it isn't there" much, much easier. I know from experience: Metafilter has had a similar feature for at least a decade, and it does help lessen a lot of the negative psychological effects caused by "likes."

This wont change anything.

Social media has made the entirety of humanity aware that civilization has been built on its entirety by a discriminatory principle, in all aspects, and all of them can be traced back to a genetic discrimination.

When this is positioned against humans attempt at transcending nature (with laws, politics and science) it becomes a matter of choice.

At the degree that our species is able to choose their sexual partners, the genetic "gap" of what we deem attractive will accelerate the same way dog breeds had been "evolving" since it became popular to breed them, which is just a couple hundred years.

The division most significant to Instagram is social class, not “discrimination.”

I am using the word discrimination in a general sense.

It's not *just* the color or race of someone's skin, but also a lot other factors.

If we trace back the repeating attributes of social class and wealth they all tend to gravitate to similar genetical discriminations (from wikipedia: "ability to distinguish one thing from another.")

And once the discrimination crosses the ingroup barrier, then the measure keeps "ranking" them among the different outgroups.

Before the internet the ingroups were not measured against outgroups as much.

I read about this on another site. I don’t use Instagram, but boy is this whole thing so convoluted! There are three different places to handle this.

To be clear, this is a _per post_ selection, that defaults to off. So, any potential impact here seems to be throttled, intentionally.

Hiding CNN, MSNBC, NYT from all citizens would increase the mental health, and physical health, of all citizens A LOT.

I always enjoy people who think newspapers are on par with television which is literally on 24/7 and is extremely loud. Like, I don't know anyone who reads the NYTs, but I have boat load of aunts and uncles who just leave cable news running all the time

It makes me think: why is a successful company which introduced a feature to supposedly improve the product beginning to consider it's better for some users to remove it instead?

I think we will regret the day when we realize we've innovated and revolutionized technology to the point where it can overpower our minds. Humans seem to be really good at designing engagement traps when they have all the tools, look to the future and see all the possibilities before them.

These people pay millions of dollars for you to choose their app over writing some words on paper, or going for a hike, or any other action you could take.

Also, I don't think Instagram would offer the option to disable likes if they didn't believe it would ultimately help them retain more users.

> Mr Mosseri said there had been a "polarised" reaction from creators - accounts which make money through brand partnerships and advertising on the platform - but that the new feature didn’t affect revenues.

Considering how many people make a living directly or indirectly on Instagram and/or other social media platforms, I wonder what shape the opposition will take to these steadily growing measures of user "protection". I understand Instagram/Facebook, at the end of the day, will not take actions that will harm their expected growth or revenue, however, that does not mean influencers won't get shafted in some way.

It's not likes giving people anxiety, it's the gaze of the panopticon.

Or.. and hear me out here..

Just close your account completely?

We’ve seen a great many of the people that built these systems come forward to explain that not only do they regret their role but that the harm being caused is worse than most people believe.

I’ve also not seen or heard anyone (even people that currently work there) argue that these networks are in any way a net positive for society or the vast majority of participants. This should be a red flag to you as a user.

Maybe we could do something similar to what goes on cigarette packs.

BROWSING STAGED AND MANIPULATED PHOTOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.

I get a lot of positive experiences an connections out of both Instagram and Facebook. I use them solely for hobby purposes though.

I’m part or the largest Danish Blood Bowl 2 league and it’s all organised through Facebook. So is almost all our table top tournaments, and it’s really an wonderful community, even when you branch out into the warhammer general community in Denmark. I use Instagram solely for painting miniatures, finding inspiration, sharing experiences and connecting with other people to learn from or teach them tips and tricks.

This is all very anecdotal of course, but I think SoMe is just what you use it for. I share your worry, but I wonder if we’d get rid of the pressurised competitive society without the platforms, or they just made that part of modern western society very easy to share.

I do wonder why people post pictures of themselves, or why people look at them. I get that there are a lot of beautiful people on platforms like Instagram, but there are so many that you sort of expect them to drown each other out. I don’t get it at least, but for hobby and creative purposes, I do think these platforms are kind of great.

I can respect this, but then is it the case that SoMe is adding value to the community, or that you've just found a positive community that happens to use that service to communicate?

What I mean by that is, if your community was in touch via some other platform would it still be the same positive community? (My guess is, yes it would - but maybe there's some specific value from these tools that I don't see).

As a counterpoint I use Instagram maybe 2 hours a week total and get some minor value at little cost. I dont really see a benefit in closing my account.

Like anything, if you know how to moderate your experience and balance your time and energy, you can derive something positive getting it. Speaking from personal experience, my Twitter experience got much much better once I got diligent about adding muted words for anything political or the outrage du jour.

The problem is that not everybody does, or want to do that. Teenagers, for example, are highly influenceable (sp?) but their peers, so they get controlled by social media rather than the other way around. Same with people following celebrities/influencers. It's easy to build a collective consciousness that people compare themselves too, to their loss.

what I don't get about this is it seemed to me across multiple accounts that this has been in effect for a year maybe two! Gotten used to it, not news etc. I know, wasn't 'global' -- but when it's rolled out in major markets like US, Canada, probably a bunch of EU, Australia etc..... it's totally a normal thing by now. 2 years!

previous discussion about the roll out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21491648

“Cigarette companies allow smokers to choose not to smoke cigarettes”

Dang,

Why is there a total upvote count for users? I think it makes me focus excessively on social status -- after all, it's right next to my name. What would you think about removing it?

I'd be quite content with the option of hiding mine. There's zero programmatic value to me or any other HN readers (we don't have sub-HNs we have to moderate ourselves), and I tend to determine credibility by reviewing a person's past submissions and comments rather than gleaning a simple score.

For what little that's worth.

This has always been one of my favorite features of Tumblr, the ability to hide your likes and who you follow. Not only that, but Tumblr doesn't show follower counts - something that is immensely useful (especially as someone who had over a million) and you can implement your own if you want. It gives you a concept of social privacy in at least the things that matter - your network.

I hope Twitter follows suit.

It’s definitely a progress for Instagram but probably a little one if the algorithm sorting is not changed.

For those who may need, there have been browser addons for Twitter and Facebook to do the same. [1]

Also worth noting Mastodon has this demetricator feature built in since quite a while ago.

[1] https://github.com/bengrosser

It was mostly the lack of any usefulness. But one of the other major reasons I deleted my Facebook years ago was that I used to feel disappointed when one of my posts had less comments or likes. I knew it was time to delete that social network.

Children and teenagers could have life altering effects due to constant exposure to such experiences on these sites.

They had disabled showing likes here in Canada for a couple of years it seemed like then I got a message when I opened the app "would you like to see like totals?". Anyways the app is almost completely unusable now with the amount of ads it shows.

How exactly does this mechanic work? If I hide likes on one of my posts, can no-one who views it see like count?

Does this mean the liker's are also hidden? Or is the information about the number of likes just one more click away for the viewer or the post?

Cool! Now let us browse (and maybe give us a chronological feed?) without logging in maybe?

Now we just need Spotify to hide play counts... These have a terrible effect on artists.

I thought I'd seen bad analogies before, but I had no idea what was possible.

Haha thank you!

That genuinely made me laugh haha

You are right - they are terrible analogies, and I am proud of them.

Without likes people will have no idea if people are reading their posts other than comments, which are rare compared to low-effort "like" clicks. It's not going to work.

Just add parental controls: No like count, no comments, no @ mentions. The kids can still express themselves creatively and they can't be bullied through features.

This could be considered a landmark that marks the end of social manipulative media. Good riddance you won't be missed

(Because hiding/unhiding will be the next social signaling)

We should probably go the opposite way and increase it to absurd like don't stop running or don't eat until you get enough likes... /s

If they truly cared about users mental health FB/IG and Twitter would also add a switch in the options to hide all political discussion.

I did that manually last year by blocking all lowbrow sources (orgs and individuals) in the FB news feed.

It's third party but I did almost exactly this with Tweetbot's mute feature. A lot of political topics can be summarized in a few buzzwords. Twitter tends to be much more focused on positivity and work topics since I've made this change.

You can do this on standard Twitter too, and I do. But it's a game of whack a mole, every few weeks theres another political hot topic that floods the timeline and I have to add another word to the blocklist which is now over 1000 words.

What frustrates me is I know Twitter knows these topics are political, I know they could add a switch to hide it all but I also suspect they don't want to because they consider it important that I hear about what they consider important.

America is not the world but the rest of the world is subjected constantly to events and outrage as if it is the whole world because the people running these platforms only have a very small perspective of what the world is.

I am waiting this to be followed by "premium" tier for consumers that allows them to see "hidden" likes.

Will Instagram allow users to hide the explore/reels pages which are algorithmically designed to be addicting?

Wow my mental health seems to have improved significantly since they added this feature!

This is an app I happily deleted years ago and life has been so good ever since

They would need to make this the default if they want it to work at all.

I though people like to show off the like count on insta...

Sprout Social - Please ignore.