Earlier this year, Instagram began testing a pilot program dismantling the “likes” feature under the assumption it could improve its users’ mental health. I can see how removing likes would relieve the pressure of comparison for many users. However, the number of likes a post receives isn’t the only metric of comparison, and disabling likes isn’t going to make those of us who constantly compare ourselves to others online feel 100% better.
For me, the number of likes on an Insta post stopped mattering a long time ago.
While there are lists on lists of strategies to get more likes on a photo, as a user I just double-tap whenever I see a friend’s name (or a particularly good dessert on Bon Appétit’s page). Getting extra likes from strangers and vague acquaintances by adding hashtags and carefully timing my posts just doesn’t seem worth it. I’m here to post and like pictures of dogs, my friends, and my friends’ dogs, not make money through advertisers. If my friends like my post, I consider it a success.
Plus, Instagram’s constantly changing algorithms and timelines make it difficult to get a true comparison by likes alone.
How am I supposed to compare my post from 20 minutes ago to my friend’s post from two days ago? All the likes I see on a given photo are relative to when it went live, so it’s difficult to get a true sense of how popular a photo is unless I go through the trouble of going to someone’s profile and scrolling through their posts. Like I said, I’m here to post and like pictures of my friends and some dogs, not count exactly how many likes my high school field hockey captain got on her engagement announcement.
This is not to say that removing likes from Instagram won’t drastically change my experience on the platform. However, there are still aspects of Instagram that encourage comparison and negatively affect my mental health—and likely that of others, as well.
First of all, there are the photos themselves.
I don’t need to see how many people liked a photo to start drawing comparisons. Is that girl’s hair glossier than mine? Are that person’s arms more defined? Is that vacation cooler than the one I posted about? Why didn’t I go to brunch last Sunday? The pithy captions beneath the photos never betray the real effort that went into taking, editing, and posting them, and I fall for it every time.
Secondly, though Instagram Stories were made to provide a more relaxed option for users to post lower quality photos, they still spark some serious FOMO.
I’ve been out of the country for a grant these past few months, and on a particularly isolated Saturday, I found myself scrolling through story after story of my friends back home going out to dinner and dancing at clubs. I started feeling homesick, and then I saw stories from other grantees who were hanging out with their new friends. That made me feel even worse. By using a feature on the platform that has never included likes, I still managed to end up feeling like the loneliest loser in the world.
So what are we to do about this? I’m not advocating that Instagram doesn’t delete the likes feature—I think it’s an important step toward ensuring more users have a healthy relationship with the platform. But we, the users, can be doing more to help ourselves create more boundaries with Instagram and prevent comparing ourselves to others.
One of the simplest changes is to stop following people you don’t like, or whose posts always make you feel bad.
I combed through the list of people I follow a while back and dropped all the people I don’t currently talk to and all the celebrities who made me feel small and unaccomplished. When I look at posts from people I care about and celebrities who use their platforms to build up their followers’ confidence, I feel a lot better than I did when my feed was full of impossible comparisons.
We can also time our usage of the app more carefully—maybe don’t log on when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday wishing you were somewhere else. Put on a movie and allow yourself to enjoy your night.
Lastly, and most importantly, we can be more honest in our posts.
You know it took 50 takes to get that one selfie to look so hot, so why not let your followers know? The honesty of “this vacation post is from last summer” in a caption can make the difference between feeling upset and feeling entertained when looking at a photo.
Instagram is a platform designed to share our favorite moments with an audience, so by nature, it’s impossible to remove the possibility of comparing our lives to the ones people post about. Removing likes is not a cure-all, and there may be nothing Instagram can do to truly end the comparisons, FOMO, and self-hate the platform encourages. The more honest we are about our posts—and honestly, the less time we spend on Instagram at all—the better we’ll all feel about Instagram.
