Social networks built on public status markers are now starting to hide them.

By John Hermann @ NYTimes/Style, May 31

In late April, at F8, Facebook’s annual event for developers, the company’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced some updates. Plenty of things would be added to the photo-sharing app: new ways to post Stories, new ways to buy stuff, an updated camera. Some things might also be taken away. Follower counts, Instagram’s main status marker, would become “much less prominent” in users’ profiles. “A bigger idea,” he told the gathered crowd, was “private like counts,” meaning no more numbers under your friends’ posts.

Earlier that month, during an interview at a TED conference, the Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey shared a big idea of his own. “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much,” he said. “I would not emphasize the ‘like’ count as much. I don’t think I would even create ‘like’ in the first place.” A few weeks later, in a post on its community blog, YouTube announced a small but notable change to the way it would display subscriber counts on channels — in more cases, the company said, numbers would be rounded.

Following years of increasing scrutiny, leaders at each company seem to be gathering around the same small solution: adjusting or eliminating metrics. This would represent a notable turn for services so strongly identified with public, comparable and newly valuable numbers. It also raises the question: If this is their solution, what do these people think is the problem? [....]