Facebook is retooling Instagram to take some social pressure out of social media. The photo-sharing app, which along with the iPhone sparked a revolution in instant photography, will reduce the pressure by making “likes” private so followers engage the content, not how popular it is. Instagram is also playing with ways to reduce the prominence of follower counts. During Facebook’s F8 developer conference today, Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s vice president of content, said his team is testing new features that put “people first.” Instagram also plans to add a Create Mode to Stories, allowing users to start a story without first uploading photos or video. The feature would also let users start an Instagram story with stickers or text. An artist could even solicit donations for a project with a special Donations sticker. Instagram will also gain new tools to combat bullying, including a “nudge” from the company to dial back rude comments. Users going through difficult events will be able to activate a special “away” mode. Instagram, which attracts 1 billion active users each month, is also rolling out additional shopping features. They will allow users to shop directly in the app and assign tags to products, such as clothing, rather than filling out an extended caption with hashtags and links.<doc-sep>Today, the Facebook-ization of Instagram seems inevitable based on changes announced at F8 today. Instagram head Adam Mosseri introduced “create mode,” a new stories format made just for text, quizzes, polls, and all of Instagram’s other features not related to photos or videos. It’s essentially a dupe of Facebook’s color block statuses launched in 2017. Since its acquisition by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has been steadily porting over Facebook features: video, tagging, albums, advertising, and private messaging. With stories, it has cloned ephemeral photo and video sharing from its primary competitor, Snapchat. Instagram has been growing rapidly, perhaps as people gravitate toward its simpler, selective focus over Facebook’s maximalist share-all-share-everything platform that mixes in a flurry of life updates, articles, birthday notifications, and whatnot. Instagram is a single, cohesive stream of photos and videos. But that’s been changing, and given a handful of announcements at the company's F8 developer conference today, the transformation looks to be picking up speed. SAN JOSE, California — Scarred by a seemingly endless parade of scandals and troubled by an ongoing decline in usage among teens and millennials, Facebook's leadership seems to be trying to recreate its flatlining social network on Instagram, its younger, hipper, money-making, and still relatively scandal-free arm. Another new Instagram feature: “Donation stickers,” which allow users to raise money for charity through stories. On Facebook, users have been able to fundraise for nonprofits since 2015, and have collected over $300 million just through birthday fundraisers alone as of August 2018. Instagram has also added ways for people to spend more money on the platform. Last month, users could start buying products from certain brands directly on the app through shopping tags, which are like Facebook’s “Shop Now” ad modules, except they don’t look like ads. Today, Instagram said select influencers could start adding those shopping tags to their posts. (An Instagram spokesperson clarified that influencers would not get a cut of any revenue generated from those shopping tags.) One of Facebook’s most active features — groups — isn’t officially on Instagram, but that hasn’t stopped its users from creating ad hoc, group-esque pages on the social network anyway. It seems only a matter of time until groups are added to Instagram as well. In the aftermath of a truly scandal-riddled 2018, it makes sense that Facebook would look for shelter and opportunity in another of its core brands — particularly one that's growing so quickly. Recall that Facebook's user base in the US has declined by 15 million people since 2017, according to survey data by market research firm Edison Research. And people are spending less time on Facebook and Messenger — about 10% less time per person between August 2016 and October 2018, a Pivotal Research study found (That said, Facebook's monthly active users in 2018's fourth quarter increased by 9% year-over-year to 2.32 billion people, but that was mainly fueled by growth Asia and Latin America). Meanwhile, Instagram’s growth is exploding. Last June, the app reached 1 billion monthly active users, 200 million more than the year before, which gained 200 million more users than the year before that. Facebook’s and WhatsApp‘s user bases may be much larger (over 2 billion and 1.5 billion, respectively), but Instagram still outperforms them on one key metric — growth. Soon, Instagram will account for the majority of Facebook’s new advertising revenue: nearly 70% by 2020, according to KeyBanc Capital Markets estimates. Why not trick it out with features similar or identical to the ones that undergirded Facebook's growth? Perhaps most importantly, Instagram has largely escaped the outrage lobbed at its larger sibling over the last year. Sure, it's grappled with misinformation as well, but it doesn’t have anything close to the baggage that Facebook does. At least not yet.<doc-sep>It’s a sad state of affairs that so many social media users tend to base self-worth on how many “likes” their post garners, but Instagram — the platform of choice for today’s cultural influencers — may be trying to change that. App engineer Jane Manchun Wong tweeted some interesting information she uncovered Thursday while parsing Instagram’s back-end. Apparently, “The Gram” has a setting written in its code that would hide the “like” count from audiences, making them only visible to the user who shared the post. “We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get,” a notification from Instagram reads. “During this test, only the person who shared a post will see the total number of likes it gets.” Instagram says they have no plans to launch the feature just yet. “We’re not testing this at the moment, but exploring ways to reduce pressure on Instagram is something we’re always thinking about,” an Instagram spokesperson tells The Verge. Nevertheless, the timing of the discovering is intriguing: Earlier this week, the Information Commissioner’s Office, a data watchdog agency in the UK, suggested that social media networks refrain from using “nudge techniques,” such as the “like” button, which encourages kids to share more and more of what could be private and sensitive information about themselves. For many, hidden “likes” could provide some peace of mind: No more obsessively checking your phone for notifications after a post, or lamenting that not enough of your followers appreciates your internet presence. But for those whose entire career is hinged on a follower count, social engagement and, yes, “likes,” the change could transform how influencers measure their value to brands. “I think it would affect my business,” says beauty influencer Nanite Jean-Aimee, whose account @melaninmakeup has some 12,200 followers. “The more engagement you have the higher chance of you getting more sponsorships and collaborations.” Jean-Aimee says many users will buy faux followers (who do not like or comment on posts) to attract lax brands that “don’t take their time to really analyze engagement in relation to followers” — pointing out that users with tens of thousands of followers but only a few hundred likes is usually red-flag for a bought audience. But for her, audience interaction is a big selling point. “Many brands work with me because of my engagement,” she tells The Post. “I know quite a few people with half my following working with big brands because they get like 1,000 likes per post.” Dara Pollak’s brand @skinnypignyc boasts nearly 100,000 followers, but she doesn’t seem as concerned. In fact, she suggests that the change could be good for business. “If a brand wants to know what your likes are, they can ask you for a screenshot which is something they do already for stories, impressions, etc,” she tells The Post, adding that it could help even out the playing field among influencers. “The brand [will have to] do a bit more research into who is representing them instead of picking only the ones with high numbers,” says Pollak. Her hope is that the change would give Instagram culture something it’s so desperately lacked lately: “authenticity.” This story originally appeared in the New York Post.<doc-sep>
Instagram is seemingly considering a major shift in functionality. According to code found within the Instagram app, the company has considered hiding the number of likes a post gets. Instead, the interface focuses on who liked the image. The change was first noticed by social media researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who regularly discovers hidden changes within social media applications. In the interface shown here, Instagram explains the motivation behind the hidden likes: We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes you get. During this test, only the person who shared a post will see the total number of likes it gets. Essentially, this means that you can still obsess over the number of likes your post on Instagram gets, but others won’t be able to. In a statement to The Verge, Instagram said that while it is not actively testing this feature, but added that it is always looking for ways to “reduce pressure” on its platform. “We’re not testing this at the moment, but exploring ways to reduce pressure on Instagram is something we’re always thinking about,” the company said. Social networks have focused heavily on the idea of “digital wellbeing” lately. Instagram itself, for instance, last year launched a new “You’re All Caught Up” feature to help prevent so-called mindless scrolling due to its algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, added a “Your Time on Facebook” feature to help users track how munch time they spend in the app. Instagram doesn’t appear to be actively testing this hidden likes feature right now, so it’s hard to know when or if it might roll out to everyone. Nonetheless, it’s clearly something the social network has considered and theoretically could go live at anytime. Instagram is testing hiding like count from audiences, as stated in the app: "We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get" pic.twitter.com/MN7woHowVN — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 18, 2019 The code of this unreleased feature first appeared in the latest app update two hours ago Instagram told the press they are "not testing" this, which in my opinion is a word play — Instagram did not deny the fact the feature is being prototyped / developed — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 18, 2019 FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: