Last month, Instagram went global with hiding like counts. For some of us, it was a welcome change and refreshment of the app. But for others, especially influencers, this was a disaster. But there’s a solution.
If you prefer seeing everyone’s like counts, The Return of the Likes comes to the rescue. This browser extension lets you see how many likes there are on other people’s posts, just the way it was before.
The company behind the extension is Socialinsider. Not surprisingly, they make software for competitive benchmarking and social media analytics for digital agencies.
The Return of the Likes is available for download in Chrome Web Store and aimed to help everyone who, for whichever reason, hate Instagram’s latest change. “Instagram has stopped displaying the number of likes and comments in some areas,” the description reads. “That makes the life of a Social Media person very complicated so we thought about lending a hand.”
Instagram began testing the feature in May this year. It was tested in Canada first and Instagram expanded it to six more countries in July. It was unrolled in the USA in November, and shortly after that, the feature was rolled out for a percentage of users worldwide.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am a part of the test, so I can see what it looks like when the like counts are hidden. Therefore, I was also able to test out The Return of the Likes and see how (and if) it works. It reveals the number of likes and comments in the upper right corner of a photo when you scroll to it on your Feed. You can also go to someone’s profile and see the number of likes and comments under each individual photo.
You still can’t see the like counts when you click on an individual photo to open it.
Now, the extension only works if you scroll through Instagram on your desktop, which is an obvious limitation. Still, if you see something while using Instagram on your phone and you really want to know how many likes the post got… Well, you can always save the post and view it through the browser.
So, are you gonna use this extension? Or you don’t care how many likes other people get? I’m in the second group, and I already removed the extension.
[via Tech Crunch]
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