From C/Net:
Facebook began hiding likes on Friday, Sept. 27, making the number of reactions, views and likes visible only to a post’s author. The test kicked off in Australia, the social media giant confirmed last week, and includes ads.
“We are running a limited test where like, reaction and video view counts are made private across Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNET in an emailed statement on Sept. 26.
. . . .
As of Sept. 30, Facebook said it is still expanding the experiment to more people in Australia, but it should be out to the majority of people in the country within the next day or two.
The social network indicated earlier in September that it might experiment with hiding likes, after testing the approach on Facebook-owned Instagram this year. In August, Facebook said the Instagram test was meant to “remove the pressure of how many likes a post will receive” on Instagram, and that Facebook was “excited by the early test results.”
Link to the rest at C/Net
PG would be interested in comments from serious Facebook users about whether this is a good/bad/whatever idea for authors who use FB as an important part of their promotional efforts.
Hiding likes might make people actually think for themselves instead of following the crowd. And, what if the post’s author posted how many likes were coming in? No one would know whether this is accurate or not.
Downside is nobody knows if others liked something, upside is it does the hate mobs no good if nobody can see they tried to hate something into the ground.
I do like Amazon’s little ‘verified purchase’ marker, at least that way they paid to have their say.
The paid Amazon.
When it was published, lo, all those years ago, I bought and read Joe Haldeman, All My Sins Remembered. Some years ago, before an e-edition was available, I left a 5-star review on Amazon. Had not bought the book through Amazon.
My review is gone.
Make of that what you will.
Agreed, but I’ll accept the loss of a few good reviews if it means the let’s-one-star-and-call-it-crap-because-we-don’t-like-something-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-book crowd doesn’t get their 15 seconds of hate in.
MYMV and you get only the reviews you deserve. 😉