One of Facebook's most 'liked' features is set to disappear

All the controversies aside, Facebook is still one of the most used social media platforms for sharing daily updates in the form of videos, images and text statuses. And among other things, it is the number of ‘likes’ that is considered as one of the benchmarks to determine the popularity of such posts. But it looks like this important feature may be taking off from the social media website, as reported by software engineer Jane Manchun Wong and confirmed by Facebook itself. However, the ‘Likes’ will be going away as a part of tests for now.

The report mentions that as a part of the test, users will see just a few friends who have liked the post and nothing else. The post won’t show the Like count at all. The aim of this is to prevent users from comparing their posts with others and considering their accounts as more powerful. This move may also prevent them from deleting posts that have received less number of likes.

Facebook is working to hide like counts, too!https://t.co/WnUrM12aZg

Tip @Techmeme pic.twitter.com/TdT73wT6A0

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) September 2, 2019

Facebook confirmed that this will be a part of the test that is being done by the social media firm. However, it is not yet live for users. The feature found by Wong was hidden inside the Android app’s codes. It is not for sure when exactly Facebook will begin its test.

For what’s worth, the company has already started testing a similar feature on its Instagram platform. However, the firm has not yet revealed how the test results fared. Instagram’s removal of ‘Likes’ or hearts is being tested in Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Ireland and Japan.

From the images shared by Wong, one can see that this just doesn’t affect the ‘Likes’ on a post but is applicable to other Reactions as well. Tapping on it just shows the list of people who have liked or reacted to the post without showing any numbers.