Demetrification: Removing the numbers of likes and retweets from public view

It's a loss of potential revenue that advertisers and content creators can make advertising deals directly, without depending on instagram as a middleman.

The article touches on this at the end, which I think is the most important part:

"For social media titans, full demetrication would require a more radical abandonment of faith in data, and a disavowal of the numbers-driven “growth mindset” that has powered Silicon Valley for so long."

I'm conflicted on this change. On the one hand, we can see how visible like and follower counts incentivises wrong behaviour on the user side (let's leave aside ethical concerns about "nudging" users to the "correct" usage).

But on the other, these data points are still there for the company. They still know how many likes, and followers you have. They randomize your timeline to increase engagement. So this is not a radical change for them, they are still going to use all the data points they can to push you in the direction they want. The main thing this changes is how transparent they are about this. For Instagram, this means pushing you to use stories more, because it's what's driving engagement now.

Also, it's worth noting that for these companies, metrics were a vital part to convince investors to buy into the companies: they could point to them and say: "see? we're growing, people are engaging!". Now that they've made it, they can afford to tune it down.

The New York Times ran an article about this back in May[0]:

"[T]oday, what you see on Twitter and Instagram already depends on a mixture of signals — things you’ve liked in the past, how much time you’ve spent looking at a particular user’s content, whether you communicate privately with a given user and whether you have an affinity for some topic or another — not just chronology, likes or retweets. Those signals are all metrics too, of a sort, invisible to us but very much legible to the platforms themselves. Imagine a ticker in your Instagram app counting up the number of times you’ve scrolled, or tallying the number of times you’ve tapped, or counting up the seconds you’ve spent looking at an image. These already exist, somewhere, and may inform what you see every day. They’re just not for you to know.

Understood this way, the idea that metrics are the problem sounds an awful lot like these companies saying their users can no longer be trusted, not even with the scraps of actionable data they’ve been allowed to see for years."

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/style/are-likes-and-follo...

Not so simple; it persists the collapses somehow (I think server side attached to your account rather than your session.) That’s a lot more complexity than the equivalent Reddit feature, for a change.

They still adjust the algorithm all the time and that tends to piss off a lot of people, too.

> expect Instagram to roll out a new system where influencers will need to pay for potential reach and Instagram will start making a lot of money.

This makes sense from the perspective of the relationship between, say, Kim Kardashian and Instagram. More reach is directly valuable to some people.

But it kind of falls down when you think about the ordinary customer base. A lot of people will want to follow Kim Kardashian. They may not have any other reason to use Instagram at all. But when they try to follow her account, it doesn't look good to show the message "you can't see Kim Kardashian's pictures, because 200,000 other people have already signed up to look at them. Try asking Kim to upgrade her account! (But no, you can't message her here.)"

Summary -- charging popular accounts for potential reach, as opposed to charging advertisers for pushed advertisements, can have strong negative effects on your user base, despite the fact that those users never wanted the reach. They did want their favorite popular accounts to be able to reach them.