Paris Martineau reports in Wired:
Publicly measurable indicators—including views, retweets, or likes—are “one of the driving forces in radicalization.”A user can be radicalized by consuming content and a creator can be radicalized by users’ reactions to their content, as they tailor their behavior around what garners the most interest from their audience. The concerns are leading some companies to explore ways to promote “conversational health.” Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have moved to deemphasize key metrics in the name of promoting healthy user engagement. Users aren’t going to abandon (social media) just because it took away their favorite means of measuring who won the race to the bottom.Where would they even go?
Online, value is quantifiable. The worth of a person, idea, movement, meme, or tweet is often based on a tally of actions: likes, retweets, shares, followers, views, replies, claps, and swipes-up, among others.
Each is an individual action. Together, though, they take on outsized meaning. A YouTube video with 100,000 views seems more valuable than one with 10, even though views—like nearly every form of online engagement—can be easily bought. It’s a paradoxical love affair. And it’s far from an accident.
Increased engagement is good for business, and the impulse to check the score is an easy way to keep users coming back. As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey put it at last year’s WIRED25 conference: “Right now we have a big Like button with a heart on it and we’re incentivizing people to want it to go up,” and to get more followers.
But these tactics are attracting increased scrutiny, about their impact on the health of the internet and on society at large. Publicly measurable indicators—including views, retweets, or likes—are “one of the driving forces in radicalization,” says Whitney Phillips, a media manipulation researcher and associate professor at Syracuse University. It works both ways, she says. A user can be radicalized by consuming content and a creator can be radicalized by users’ reactions to their content, as they tailor their behavior around what garners the most interest from their audience.
The concerns are leading some companies to explore ways to promote “conversational health.” Over the past year, Facebook, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), Twitter, and YouTube have moved to deemphasize or eliminate key metrics in the name of promoting healthy user engagement. The trend gave birth to a word you won’t find in dictionaries: demetrication.
Yet the changes have been decried by some of the very users they were meant to aid, who view the metrics as an essential part of their experience. That’s left platforms in the awkward position of detoxing users from an addiction they initially introduced to users.
Over the past year, even rumors of demetrication have sent users into a full-blown panic. When Dorsey followed up his comments about likes by questioning whether the button itself should exist, people flipped out. User panic reached a fever pitch a few days later, after a Telegraph report detailed a meeting where Dorsey reportedly questioned the utility of the Like button and said it could disappear “soon.” Users took to Twitter en masse to decry the decision, with many posting updates threatening to leave the platform if left without likes; dozens of tweets criticizing the idea quickly went viral—all without Twitter saying anything about the feature’s fate.
The same thing happened in March, after users got wind of a test in Twitter’s semipublic prototype app twttr, referred to internally as “little t,” which hid some like and retweet tallies. The change was designed to encourage users to focus on the content of tweets rather than on which one racked up the most likes.
The metrics were visible to “little t” users who tapped on the tweet, and the update had not been pushed to the official Twitter app. But early reports on the feature sent users into a tizzy. Outrage over the possible change amassed so quickly that Twitter issued a statement clarifying that it was merely a test.
We’ve heard from a lot of people that they really miss those counts, and it is an extra tap to [access] them and that can be challenging, but we’ve also heard from people that they’re finding that they’re actually reading the content more,” Twitter’s product director Sara Haider said of the feature on Mat Navarra’s Geekout podcast last week.
It’s not surprising that hiding engagement metrics results in less engagement. But some social media companies are pushing ahead nonetheless. In May, Instagram hid the number of likes on users’ posts in Canada; it has since hidden the count elsewhere, including Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. The company says the change is to incentivize users to focus on the content shared, rather than the like tallies, and that it will weaken the shady companies that sell fake Instagram likes and other forms of artificial engagement.
Yet that argument appears to be lost on users, who criticized the change. Many users said it would make it harder to deduce whether an Instagram user’s follower count is legitimate and that the decision ignores users’ primary issues with the platform. Complaints have increased as Instagram hides likes in more places, as have scaremongering (and probably inaccurate) predictions that it will be the downfall of influencers.
A similar cycle began earlier this month after Facebook copped to testing a nearly identical like-hiding feature. More wailing is sure to come over the next month as YouTube rolls out a controversial design change that will abbreviate subscriber counts.
YouTube said in May that it would display truncated tallies instead of precise follower totals (ie, 4.2M subscribers instead of 4,203,999), provoking horror from many YouTube users and creators—and the cottage industry of YouTube analytics services that rely on precise data from the company’s API Service to track creators’ stats. Unlike the redesigns pushed by other social media companies, YouTube’s update eliminates public tallies entirely, meaning that only the YouTube creator will know exactly how many users have subscribed to their channel.
YouTubers have long used the metric as a means to calculate real-time public sentiment toward a particular creator. The winners and losers in high-profile spats between YouTubers are often judged by analyzing trends in subscriber counts in the hours after key videos or updates are published.
Users took to Twitter and other social media platforms (including YouTube) to protest the change in May, briefly making a Trend of a hashtag campaign to save a popular YouTube analytics service.
On August 29, YouTube quietly updated its May blog post about the change to say it would now be introduced to users gradually in September, though it doesn’t appear to have been implemented yet. The company also gave a different explanation for the reasoning behind the partial demetrication: user health.
“Beyond creating more consistency, this addresses creator concerns about stress and wellbeing, specifically around tracking public subscriber counts in real time,” noted the update. “We hope this helps all creators focus on telling their story, and experience less pressure about the numbers.”
Phillips, the media manipulation researcher, says that demetrication, if done correctly, could improve online discourse. “Content creators suddenly wouldn't have an immediate gauge of what to do. And that could have a potentially interesting and unpredictable impact on people's brands,” said Phillips. “The potential positive is that content creators who are dealing in conspiracy theori[es] and [extremism] would not themselves become more radical.”
But she says it’s highly unlikely that platforms will implement these features widely enough to make a noticeable difference—it would be bad for business.
Users aren’t going to abandon YouTube just because it took away their favorite means of measuring who won the latest race to the bottom. Nor will Instagram influencers or Twitter addicts or whoever is still on Facebook flock to a different platform in response to a vexing change in UI. Where would they even go?
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