Thumbs down for the Like button – culture

At the beginning of January, the year is still fresh and the good intentions are still solid. One of the perennial favourites, of course, is abstinence, either from alcohol, sugar and fat or other things that are known to be bad for the body and mind. But since the digital existence is taking up an ever greater place in the lives of many people: perhaps we should think about how a little renunciation could be practiced here as well. It would probably be enough if one would renounce a central mechanism of social media platforms – namely the permanent quantification of our social interactions.

The American programmer and media artist Ben Grosser has exactly the right tool for this purpose: a browser extension called Twitter Demetricator. Once installed, the software hides all numbers on the platform. You can neither see how many followers a person has nor how many likes, retweets or comments a post has accumulated. Suddenly, people with a following of hundreds of millions are no different from sad creatures like yourself. The Demetricator is the great equalizer. Grosser has also published similar programs for Facebook and Instagram.

According to the media artist, the aim is “to see what happens when we can no longer judge ourselves and others based on metrics. With this work I want to break through our obsession with social media indicators, show how they influence our behavior control, and ask who benefits most from this system”.

In his view, the visible metrics make users more compulsive, competitive, and anxious. Unconsciously, he believes, they derive rules from the numbers for what they publish, with whom they network and which posts they mark with the various like options. And there are more and more such metrics: Twitter boss Elon Musk recently decided that the number of views should also be displayed under each tweet. The users are anything but pleased with it.

Demetricator users, on the other hand, enthusiastically report that it offers them a completely new experience. They no longer have the feeling that content is only good because tens of thousands of others are already doing it. Or having to optimize your own posts to get as many likes as possible. According to Grosser, these feedback loops from anticipated recipes for success for high numbers – from which the algorithms of the platforms in turn deduce that it is obviously about what particularly interests a lot of people – lead to more uniformity. It’s worth asking questions: does another user’s high following influence their perception of what they post or the decision to follow them? Do the like and retweet metrics change how people view their most recent post, does criticism possibly bounce when so many users seem to agree? Do you adapt the next post to what you think you can deduce from the numbers? Have you ever deleted a post because it wasn’t well received?

Finally, who actually benefits from a system that constantly encourages us all to evaluate and compare ourselves? For example, the makers of disinformation campaigns who use automated bots to pump up the metrics of their posts to give them the appearance of relevance and legitimacy.

What if you only had 100 posts and that was it?

Another of Grosser’s inventions is a social network called Minus. There, too, the premise of renunciation prevails. Every user gets a quota of 100 posts when they register. And every time you upload an image or an opinion, that number goes down. Until it finally arrives at zero – and you have to stay silent forever.

The artificial scarcity is of course less serious competition for the big networks than a thought experiment, a small corrective for our data-driven world: How could online communication change if we used quality instead of quantity as a benchmark and we started to waste our time and viewing our attention for the finite, precious resources that they really are? What would actually still be online if people had to worry about which opinions are worth appearing in the first place?