Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are rethinking the display of metrics such as likes, follower and view counts, because they are no longer the drivers of growth
John Herrman / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 report lands mid-arc in a debate that had been building for years: artist and programmer Ben Grosser had been pushing his "demetrication" idea since 2012, and it was starting to reach product teams — his argument for stripping visible counts off social platforms influenced exactly the experiments Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube were then weighing.
What makes the story worth revisiting is where it went: Instagram's early like-hiding tests measurably hurt creators, with influencers in affected countries reporting less engagement and slower follower growth, and by 2024 the company had settled not on hiding metrics but on replacing them — making views the universal currency across Reels, Stories, and photos, a move Facebook then mirrored.
First-order effects
- Influencers whose livelihoods are priced off visible counts face immediate repricing: where likes disappear, posts sink in feeds and follower growth slows, as the affected-country tests already showed.
- Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube shift the growth signal from public vanity counters to internally measured engagement, changing what creators optimize for overnight.
Second-order effects
- Blanket metric-hiding proves brittle — Instagram's own like-count experiments became a case study in how one-size-fits-all policies make users miserable, forcing platforms toward per-format metric redesigns instead of removal.
- Brand and sponsorship economics follow the metric: when the displayed number changes, the influencer marketing market's unit of account changes with it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, public popularity counts fade as a user-facing feature while platforms consolidate around a single platform-defined metric — Instagram's cross-format view count and Facebook's adoption of Views point to metrics becoming an instrument of algorithmic steering rather than a scoreboard.
- That consolidation hands platforms more power over creator incentives: whoever defines the primary metric effectively defines what content gets made.
The trend: Social platforms are retiring public popularity counters in favor of platform-defined engagement metrics like views, turning measurement itself into a lever for steering creator behavior.