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Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

bbc.com

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Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#191

Post by Tomminn »

totaldex wrote: post #10

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 tha…

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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#192

Post by nonbirithm »

sneak wrote: post #187
nonbirithm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#193

Post by xg15 »

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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#194

Post by sneak »

nonbirithm wrote: post #192
sneak wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, judg…

> 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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#195

Post by nashalo_nighly »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #115
offtop5 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Hack…

> 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 sectio…

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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#197

Post by cosmojg »

Tomminn wrote: post #191
totaldex wrote: post #10

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 tha…

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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#198

Post by thomasahle »

filereaper wrote: post #171
spoonjim wrote: post #159

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 do…

>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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#199

Post by spoonjim »

thomasahle wrote: post #198
filereaper wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure

#200

Post by jreese »

72deluxe wrote: post #40
deergomoo wrote: post #20

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 dow…

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.
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