Hiding your Instagram likes could give you the peace of mind you've been looking for.
that hid the place where the metrics would go on both Instagram and Twitter. The experience was, frankly, disorienting. My eyes still automatically scanned for the number of likes as I scrolled through my feeds, as if searching for a price tag on items I wanted to buy. I posted to the main feed and then instinctively refreshed to check how it was received.
I found that I was constantly looking for the approval of others while interacting with posts. Ben Grosser, who developed the demetrification extension, told me at the time that this was normal: “We’ve become reliant on numbers, so we let them stand in for meaning more than they do.” With his browser extension, he suggested that I would start to lose my old habits. I had nothing to lose but the need to be liked.
Eventually, I did relax into this denumerated experience. Posting became less about what would earn the most likes, and more about sharing updates on my life with friends. Scrolling through Instagram became more like roaming an art museum: I lingered on the posts I liked, without wanting to check their sticker price. Grosser doesn’t make demetricators for the Twitter and Instagram apps, but I keep his extensions installed on my laptop to this day.
Since I first experimented with demetrification, plenty has been said about how a need to be liked can distort our behavior online.journalist Nick Bilton artificially inflated the follower and like counts of three wanna-be influencers—and found that they became overwhelmed and absorbed with the quest to get more. These influencers knew their likes were fake; Bilton bought them from a bot farm to juice their engagement numbers.