It's no secret that we live in a social media driven world. People build brands, share work and art, create a portfolio, display special moments and highlights of their lives, and more. Without social media, it seems we would all be lost.

But as with everything in our world, social media has its many downfalls. Specifically, on Instagram, there is a lot of competition regarding who has more followers, who gets more likes, who has more views, etc. Despite the appealing nature of getting to share your most attractive photos and aesthetically pleasing feeds, it really all comes down to being better than the next person.

I can't help it, but I always compare how many likes I get on an Instagram post to a photo of someone else's. It's hard not to, especially when self-worth is seemingly based on the number of followers and likes a person has. If I don't reach such-and-such likes on a post or if so-and-so doesn't comment on it, what is the point of even posting it in the first place? It all is really just a game of becoming the most popular Insta-user and getting more attention than somebody else.

It all sounds pretty toxic to me, and luckily, Instagram agrees.

The site has recently announced that they will be testing out a feature that hides your likes and views; the personal user can see it but their follows cannot. The head of Instagram believes that "the change is designed to minimize the stress of posting online, where users can fixate on how many likes their [posts] draw." Instagram wants to return back to a time before our society was likes-and-followers crazed.

Frankly, I like this idea quite a lot. There are so many pictures I have wanted to post but they didn't match my feed or maybe it was the wrong time of day to post (yes, you have to time out your posts in order to get a sufficient amount of likes). I have wanted to post videos but decided against it as videos don't usually get as many likes as regular photos do. It's all become a game and that is not what Instagram intended to do- they want to go back to where timelines were full of posts that were made to share, not made for the most amounts of likes possible.

While some people look at this as the end of the world, it really is not. In fact, it is going to do much more good than harm in the long run. When likes are taken away, society will be able to work towards an environment where a person's worth is not determined by their Insta-status or their followers and likes. And that will most definitely be for the better.