Does the ‘Like’ Mean Anything Anymore?

[ed. What a world.]

Laura Hajek, a musician and actor better known as Edith Pop to her nearly 20,000 Instagram followers, has tried everything to get more likes on her posts over the last four years. She’s re-timed her posts after reading about what hours are best to publish photos. She’s studied how filters affect likes. (The Mayfair filter seems to garner more.) She’s put popular hashtags on photos (#brooklyn and #music). At one point, she even paid for an app that encourages users to like one another’s images.

But in the past year or so, she’s found herself putting less effort into bolstering ‘likes,’ after seeing a major shift in what she calls the “‘like’ exchange rate.” Many users, especially younger fans of hers, scroll through their feeds liking nearly every post. With many people handing out likes indiscriminately, or in hopes of receiving likes back, she has seen more engagement but it doesn’t feel genuine. “The value of a ‘like’ is definitely decreasing — there is less thought involved,” she said. “Nowadays, a ‘like’ says more ‘information received’ or ‘I saw this’ than ‘I like this.’ I’ve been getting more likes on Instagram, but it just seems like the pool of people is larger and they are liking posts more, not that they actually like me or mywork.”

For years, the “like” (or, in some places, the “fav”) has been the basic unit of currency on social media: the easy, universal measure of a post or poster’s quality, popularity, and power. But its dominant position atop the default methods of engagement in social media is increasingly challenged, as Facebook expands its array of reactions and the market becomes flooded with spammers and scammers. The like doesn’t mean what it used to — not just to people looking for easy validation, but to brands and companies looking for popular, high-engagement accounts.

Look no further than the comments on the Instagram account of any member of the Kardashian clan, particularly the Jenner sisters, to witness rampant like inflation in action. There, hundreds of thousands of users — mostly teens — take part in a fast-paced trade system meant to increase the number of likes on their photos and videos. Countless “lb” (like back), “first,” and “row for row” comments outpace genuine feedback on the photos, marking social media contracts promising to like a user’s photo or first row of photos in exchange for likes on posts of their own. (...)

And if brands can no longer count on likes as indicators of true engagement, you can bet the metric has long fallen out of favor with the true arbiters of What Is Cool on the internet: teens. As a recent episode of This American Life chronicling the labyrinthian social norms of teen girls on Instagram showed, many young Instagram users mindlessly ‘like’ every post in their feed, giving no thought to whether they actually like it. With this in mind, according to my sister, a Very Cool Teen, teens are coming up with their own ways to determine what matters on Instagram.

“Likes aren’t dead yet, but it’s more about ratios now,” she told me. “The like-to-minute ratio is a big thing, like, if you posted a picture five minutes ago and you already have 60 likes people will comment ‘whoa, that ratio!’ Like-to-follower ratio is also huge. If you have 600 likes and only 1,000 followers it shows how many real followers you have.”

by Kari Paul, Select/All |  Read more:

Image: uncredited