Why I love the Instagram "hide like count" feature

If someone were to ask me what my favorite social media platform is, I would honestly probably say Instagram. If someone were to ask me which social media platform I think is the most toxic, I would also probably say Instagram. The app came out to the public around 2012-2013 which would have made me 12-years-old at the time. Do I think that that is an appropriate age to be on social media nowadays? I’m honestly not sure. But at the time everyone was downloading it so I grabbed my iPod Touch and the next thing I knew, I had made myself an account. Ever since then I have been posting on the same account for nine years which, now that I think about it, is kind of crazy.

I remember the first thing I posted on Instagram to this day. It was a jar of peanut butter and a spoon with the caption “breakfast” and one of the many default filters that the app offered at the time. I can definitely promise you that I probably had some scrambled eggs and toast that my mom had made me for breakfast that morning and not an entire jar of peanut butter. But even though that post was completely fake, it still got five likes from my 15 followers which obviously made my 12-year-old self so excited and I’ve been posting every since.

Obviously, with any social media platform, you’re more inclined to share the good parts of your life rather than the bad. I think that for me at least, this definitely rings true. However, recently I was feeling like I was sharing content that others would approve of and that would get the most likes rather than what I actually enjoy. I would go out and take photos for Instagram and be so excited to post them and then be constantly refreshing my notifications page to see who liked it and to watch the number grow. If the post didn’t get a certain number of likes, I would start to think that the photos I previously loved were terrible and delete the picture from my feed.

Now actually admitting this is somewhat embarrassing because, for the most part, I tend to not really care what people think of me (at least I try my best to.) But God forbid my Instagram post didn’t hit 100 likes I would literally become the most self-conscious girl on the planet. The weird thing is that it wasn’t like this with any other social media app. Only Instagram. It not only bothered me that I could see the like count but it also bothered me that other people could see the “low” number. Looking back on this now I realize how utterly stupid it was. Nobody cares about the number of likes anyone else gets on Instagram. But this mindset I had created for myself made the app slowly become toxic for me and every time I posted would make me more self-conscious than satisfied.

Then in 2021, the “hide likes” feature came out. At first, I was very apprehensive about it for reasons I honestly do not know. For the past eight years, I had only known Instagram as a numbers game rather than a form of self-expression. I finally decided to test out the feature this past summer and it was honestly the best social media decision I have ever made. Not only was the like count was hidden from the public, but it was also hidden from myself. Unless I actively search for it (which I never do), I don’t have to worry about a stupid little number at the bottom of every photo

This new feature took the pressure off of posting for me and made Instagram fun again. I remember in 2019 when the app first announced they were working on this feature, so many people I knew were posting about how stupid it was because ‘the whole point of Instagram is to get likes.” And for a long time, I felt that way too. But recently I’ve come to realize that the purpose of Instagram when it was created (and honestly every social media app) is to post things that YOU like and to find followers with common interests as you. You shouldn’t need to tailor your personal social media account to please anyone else but yourself.

And to an outsider, it honestly looks like there was a minimal change from the content that I posted then and the content I post now. But to me the difference is huge. Instead of posting a photo of me posing on the beach in California, I chose to post a selfie of me squinting with the sun in my eyes and my hair a mess after surfing for two hours for the sole reason that when I took the photo, I was genuinely happy. Instead of summing up my entire month in one picture of me that my friend took, I posted a slide recap of everything I did in the month of August complete with a photo of a trailhead map, farmstands, sunflowers with bees, and mountain cliffs because I wanted to share every part of my month, not just one photo. And for the first time in a long time, I can look back at my Instagram feed from this past summer and love every single picture I posted.

We are in a day and age where social media is rising faster than it ever has before. Like counts and follower counts will never truly go away and honestly, for brand purposes, I think that social media numbers disappearing would be a bad thing. I also know that plenty of people will read this post and still keep their like count on because they enjoy the numbers and like watching them grow (which is completely valid if you are one of those people.) Some may even read this post and think it’s overdramatic and a stupid topic to talk about (which again, is valid because I’m an overdramatic person.) However, I do think that this one simple change really made a difference in the way I look at social media and the numbers presented within social media for the better.

A wicked short blog post for this week, I know. I have been so busy writing a paper for my alternative media in journalism class that I found it hard to find time to write this week. But on the bright side, that paper is passed in and I got a 98% on it so we really don’t need to stress over it anymore! I’m hoping that as my schedule gets busier, I will find a better balance of writing for school and writing for Spit It Out. Also if you all ever want to suggest something for me to write about, you can do so via the contact tab above or my Twitter account @spititout_blog!

I hope you all have a lovely week!

-Meg

P.S. Here are some photos for the post! The first photo is where you can find the "hie like count" feature. The last two are a before and after of my instagram feed once I discovered the feature. The second picture is before and last is after.