Demetrification: improving social media by removing public like/follower/repost counts

When social media was young, it was obvious that it had some pathologies -- perverse incentives that drove people toward antisocial behaviour. Back in those days, a company named Flickr did some radical things that made it (briefly) the best social network on the internet (until Yahoo bought it and all but destroyed it): among other things, Flickr did not publicly display follower or favorite counts, and it would allow you to export all of your data to any rival service, provided that the rival service would implement an export function that let you change your mind and switch back to Flickr, creating a kind of mutual network of anti-lock-in services.

(Flickr also implemented by favorite feature of all time: the ability to reply to email notifications of in-network private messages by replying in email, rather than visiting the website and typing your reply there. Yahoo killed this almost immediately following the acquisition).

The result was a service in which people participated in a gift economy of following and liking, not because of social signals that told them what was popular among their peers, but because of genuine affinity. You still got to know about it when people followed and liked your work, but unless you took the (unseemly) step of publishing those facts, no one else would. It was a beautiful, fragile thing.

Since then, social media has been overtaken by metrics, which are driven in large part by the vicious cycle of advertisers wanting to know which influencers are worth paying; and by toxic fan battles to make your favorite social media accounts gain followers and likes, and to downrank your favorites' rivals. Read the rest