Hearts, hands with thumbs up, stars…it’s a “magically delicious” mix of dopamine inducing social media “Lucky Charms“. However, we’re finding that all of those arbitrary likes and loves and follows that we get on our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc are maybe about as good for us as Lucky Charms cereal are for diabetics. On their own, they’re probably fine – just like the marshmallow cereal. It’s ok to be loaded with sugar and not a lot of substance, but when introduced into the life of someone who has a hard time processing, they can turn deadly. 
Due to this platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are all considering eliminating “like counts”. You will still be able to “like” posts, but counts will be taken away. Why? Because you can’t handle the count. Anecdotes and data are both showing that the quantification of internet approval is doing terrible things to our brains and our culture. We’re living for the “like”, and it’s a treadmill that just keeps getting faster. Once we have 4 likes, we want 5. Once we have 15, we want 30. Once we drop from 500 to 400, we consider our lives absolute failures.
This is not necessarily unlike the effect of the Law of God on us. We start to do stuff, good stuff, and it starts to feel pretty good. We start to pray and read our Bibles and live our lives differently, and it feels good. But then we start to replace God with the Law of God – a tragic mistake led by our eagerness to have something that counts. Soon we start to worship “the count” of our willpower to set aside time to pray. We start to worship “the count” of our ability to read and discern the text of Scripture. We start to worship “the count” how good of a person we’ve become. We just can’t handle the count.
In the social media world, you will still be able to get a list of *who* liked and reacted to your post, you just won’t get a numerical count. The hope is that this will decrease the amount of people who go crazy from their inability to handle the count. And maybe there’s an allegory here too for the Gospel. In the Gospel, it’s the *who* that matters, not the what. God loves you. For what? It’s not your count. He loves you for you. He loves you so much that He set aside “the Count” of your sin on the cross. So stop counting and start noticing the “who” – the God who loves you, the Church He has put around you, and the “who” of yourself whom He loves irrespective of any “count”.