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[OPINION] The future of social media without likes, follower count and other metrics.
Hi everyone!
I am currently in state of validating the idea of a social media without likes, followers count and other vanity metrics. I believe those vanity metrics can be stressful for some people, might also affect their mental health. Current model is full of gamification, it’s a race to earn most likes and followers giving us dopamine hit that makes us addicted. Some people even fake their life just for the sake of number. I thought we can do better.
Removing vanity metrics could be the solution. Yes, brands and other businesses that use social media need analytics but for normal users? I don’t think so. Social media should be the place where they can share anything and anywhere they want without the fear of being validated by numbers. A free space where they can be them self, an authentic social media.
That’s my pitch, what do you think?
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16 Replies
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Australian Instagram has this for mental health reasons.
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Your a super weak person if likes are that tough on you mentally. Theres always some way to keep score in life money size of your house car you drive. Dont base your worth or happiness on likes or peoples options that’s on you not instagram
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[deleted]
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I get what you’re saying but even reddit has upvotes. I think it all depends on the culture of the platform
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An amazing idea
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[deleted]
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It is always about money. If I can’t get stats on your platform that means in the future I can’t make bank on the work I put in to get statistics and build my “brand”. So I will not use your platform – especially when I can get on Insta or wherever and use their stats to make bank.
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The activityPub application Pixelfed has the ability to disable likes (https://mastodon.social/@dansup/101006144411194950) and the Mastodon fork glitch-soc has a “Hiding follower count” feature:
https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/features/hide-follower-count/
a lot of groundbreaking dev stuff is going on around the activityPub ecosystem. I’d recommend checking out the activitypub subreddit.
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Disagree. I’m in Australia where this is happening and the account holder still sees the amount of likes, so the mental health aspect is still there. I can log in and see only 6 people liked my photo, so it hasn’t really changed anything. I can see which individuals liked it too. So again, not really combating the mental health issue.
It seems pretty obvious that Platforms doing this is really just about making more money out of advertising by de-incentivising influencer marketing. If they wanted to help, they should remove metrics completely from personal accounts or at least give them option to remove or not, and leave them active for business and creator accounts.
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If it were truly for mental health then they would have gotten rid of likes already, in the United States too. They would not have delayed. Therefore it is not about mental health but business.
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So what’s the draw for users then? If you take away the validation mechanisms, then all you really have is a glorified digital poster board. Even Reddit quantifies a users popularity through Karma.
The only website that comes to mind that is even close to this proposal is 4Chan and the users themselves devised a system to measure popularity of posts.
People always seek out ways to quantify popularity and success. Either they’ll devise a means of measuring it on their own or just jump ship to another platform.
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There’s always going to be some form of likes/numbers and self validation though. If there’s no likes or view count then people would just look at who and how many people commented etc.
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If there are no metrics, there’s no way for businesses to calculate ROI.
If there’s no way to track ROI, you don’t get advertising money.
If you don’t get advertising money, you’ll have to charge users for the service.
If people have to pay to use your social media platform, they won’t.
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They’ve already removed the number of likes from Instagram in Canada. There really hasn’t been a difference as a business user, and it definitely *feels like* this will be healthier for young people who obsess a little too much.
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As mentioned on a previous comment, The platform could STILL run on a metric-based algorithm, but it doesn’t have to be in plain view for the userbase to see.
On the front-end, it could be a pseudometric in the style/combination of Facebook’s Like system/Discord’s emoji function, where instead of a like, you could drop a reaction. User-end pie charts could instead display a ratio of reactions in percentage, & Users could could even import their own custom reactions on their posts. Likes could be the diminutive standard still, but would no longer be counted in the metric as important as reactions. On the back-end, the ACTUAL numerical algorithm is simply running in the background. Reactions could simply spell a more friendly interface to interact with.
I believe numbers cause us to associate the likes with a logistical frame of mind, causing us to value our self-worth in NUMBER of likes, hearts, etc. The name of these metrics doesn’t change the fact that they’re still NUMBERS being counted. This in turn leads to lower self-image with lower numbers, and higher based on higher numbers. It’s a fucking roller coaster.
Why does it have to be NUMBERS that we show the world? Online, numbers shouldn’t matter, only the way we *feel* about them should.
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