”We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this test, only the person who share a post will see the total number of likes it gets”. This, in the words of Instagram’s creators, is the reason for this changed being tested. They hope that removing the count of likes will make it so that people concentrate more on the quality of their content and saying things that are actually important to them rather than ”herding” large numbers of ego-boosting followers in whatever way possible. The likes count will NOT be hidden on the users profiles, though.

So far the change is only tested internally; it is unknown, though probable, if public test will become available,