Somewhere on your profile is a number that claims to say how much you matter. You did not ask for it, you cannot remove it on most platforms, and everyone who visits can see it. Status among humans is nothing new, but a public, precise, universally visible score for it is genuinely new, and it changes how comparison works in ways worth spelling out.

This piece is part of our cluster on comparison; the underlying psychology, including Festinger's finding that people measure themselves against others whenever no objective standard exists, is laid out in the pillar, how social media warps comparison. The short version relevant here: platforms took a domain that had no objective standard, social standing, and manufactured one.

Status before the scoreboard

Humans have always tracked status. Every social species does, and a great deal of human behavior, from what we wear to how we tell stories at dinner, is shaped by it. But for all of history, status had a particular texture: it was ambient and negotiated. You had a rough sense of where you stood, assembled from tone of voice, who sought your opinion, who laughed at your jokes. It varied by context: the person with low standing at work might have high standing in their choir, their friend group, their family. And it was imprecise by nature, which was a mercy. Nobody could check the exact figure.

That imprecision did real psychological work. It left room for a generous self-assessment, it let different people win different games, and it kept status local: you compared yourself with the village, not the species.

What quantification changed

A follower count deletes all three properties at once. It is precise: not "fairly well regarded" but 214. It is global: the same number in every context, with no separate score for the rooms where you shine. And it is universally comparable: your 214 sits on the same axis as a stranger's 2.1 million, inviting a comparison that would never have occurred in ambient life, because you and that stranger were never in the same room.

This is the quantification amplifier from the pillar article in its purest form. Like counts do the same thing to individual moments: each post gets a public score, so sharing something becomes, structurally, submitting an entry to a contest, whether or not you meant it that way. The same filtering machinery described in the highlight reel effect then guarantees that the entries you see from others are the high-scoring ones, so the scoreboard you scroll past is dominated by numbers larger than yours. That is not an accident of your particular network. It is arithmetic: attention concentrates, so on any metric of attention, the median user is far below the visible average.

Two groups feel this differently. Creators live inside the metrics: follower milestones, per-post performance, the visible dip when a post underperforms. For them the number is entangled with income and identity, and metric anxiety is an occupational condition. Everyone else was never trying to compete, yet stands on the same axis anyway, comparing a personal account followed by friends against accounts run as businesses with teams behind them. It is a footrace where hobbyists and professionals share one leaderboard, and nobody mentions the difference.

The hidden-likes experiment

Platforms know all this, which makes their behavior a useful piece of evidence in itself. In 2019 Instagram began publicly testing the removal of visible like counts, starting in Canada and expanding to several other countries, framing it as reducing pressure on users. The experiment ran for roughly two years. The end state, from 2021 onward, was telling: rather than hiding likes for everyone, Instagram made it an option, letting users hide like counts on their own posts and on the posts they see, in most regions.

Meta's stated reasoning was that hiding likes did not move wellbeing measures as much as expected, and that users were split, with some wanting the counts kept. That may well be true. But it is fair to note the incentive structure too: visible metrics drive engagement. Creators check back to watch numbers climb; audiences use counts to decide what deserves attention; the creator economy prices influence in followers. A platform that fully deleted its scoreboards would be removing one of its own engines. None of this requires bad faith to explain, just ordinary incentives, and it predicts what we observe: experiments that stop at optional.

There is a useful distinction hiding in here between vanity and recognition. Wanting your work or your words to be seen and appreciated is healthy and old; it is why applause exists. The scoreboard converts that recognition into a permanent, comparable, public integer, which is a different thing. You can want recognition without wanting to be ranked. The design gives you both or neither.

What you can actually do

The mechanism suggests the interventions, so here they are, plainly.

  • Hide like counts in the app. As of 2024 onward, Instagram settings in most regions let you hide like and view counts both on your own posts and on posts from others. It takes a minute and removes one running comparison from every scroll.
  • Stop checking your own numbers on a schedule. If you catch yourself monitoring follower counts the way people check stock prices, that is the metric loop running you. Some people give the number a single scheduled check per month, which keeps information without the drip.
  • Use tools that strip metrics. Browser extensions exist that hide like, view, and follower counts across major platforms in your browser, so the content arrives without its scores. The feed reads strangely for a few days, then normally, which tells you something about how much of your reading was really score-reading.
  • Notice whose numbers you compare against. If the accounts making you feel small are professional operations, remember you are reading a business's revenue chart as if it were a peer's report card. The confusion between a familiar-feeling professional and an actual peer runs deep, and it is the whole subject of celebrity and influencer envy.

The takeaway

Status is not going away; it is part of being human. What is optional is the scoreboard: the precise, global, always-visible number bolted onto a drive that functioned for millennia on ambient, local, forgiving information. The platforms will keep the numbers as long as the numbers keep engagement up. You do not have to keep looking at them, and the step-by-step version of opting out, alongside the rest of the comparison cleanup, is in how to quit the compare game.