
Demetrification: Removing the numbers of likes and retweets from public view - paps
https://onezero.medium.com/the-illinois-artist-behind-social-medias-latest-big-idea-3aa657e47f30
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dwd
Nice idea, but I think this misses the reality of what is happening. Instagram
is removing likes because it incentivises an economic system that they are not
only left out of, but is a net cost to them.

Top influencers make a lot of money based on those metrics, Instagram doesn't
see a cent of that yet they support these "businesses". Does anyone consider
what it costs to distribute a post to 10s of millions of people? As an
analogy, consider a system where advertisers paid the actor and the film crew
to produce an ad, which was then distributed for free by the television
studio. Not going to happen as it's completely unsustainable. Instagram is
increasing the monetisation of the platform, and allowing advertisers free
direct access to the metrics means you can't sell it.

Once it's gone, expect Instagram to roll out a new system where influencers
will need to pay for potential reach and Instagram will start making a lot of
money.

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jimmaswell
It's a cost to them that more people are coming to the platform and viewing
ads? I don't get it.

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pyhtel
It's a loss of potential revenue that advertisers and content creators can
make advertising deals directly, without depending on instagram as a
middleman.

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mtgx
I guess Instagram follows the opposite of Bill Gates advice on platforms --
strive to capture 100% of all the value created on the "platform".

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keyle
Related to this, I remember when HN was showing the amount of upvotes on
comments (like it does on posts).

I still miss it, because quickly scanning a very thick amount of content, I'd
like to know where I should spend time. I do it with posts (and the list /best
is great if you're short on time).

The ordering still supposedly shows us the very recent followed by the 'solid
comments', but there is 0 information about how 'solid' that comment is by
consensus.

That being said, my favourite part of HN is the [-], so when I'm done with
someone's opinion and their 300 responses, I can just skip it.

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sigsergv
Funny thing: I still don't know what [-] means, there are no tooltips or any
other hints so I prefer not to click it.

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realusername
It's just a simple collapse thread feature.

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derefr
Not so simple; it persists the collapses somehow (I think server side attached
to your account rather than your session.) That’s a lot more complexity than
the equivalent Reddit feature, for a change.

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MrGilbert
Hm... I always thought it has to do with the comments that get slowly grayed
out? E.g., for me that was basically a "downvote".

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mjlee
There is a downvote button, but you need some minimum karma for it to be
available to you.

I can understand why it might be confusing if there's no downvote arrow
visible!

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MrGilbert
Yeah, that some kind of UX pardigm - don't hide the control. Disable it, and
explain the user why he cannot use it at the moment.

On the other hand, though, I can now simply collapse huge branches without
downvoting anyone, so thanks for the clarification! :)

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RandomInteger4
This is so stupid and pointless, all because a few people that over-obsess
about essentially inconsequential numbers don't understand how rash
generalization is a logical fallacy, so they assume their experiences must be
everyone else's experiences.

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airstrike
> 1.5K claps

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linuxftw
I think part of the incentive of using a platform is building up a following
to leverage ad revenue yourself. It's currently a win-win. Popular people on
social media can get sponsorships, the platform gets to show people ads from
their network. Platforms are getting the content for _free_. If they remove
the ability of users to negotiate sponsorships, they'll need to start paying
for the content.

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dmourati
Title got the key name wrong, it's demetrication.

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gberger
Thanks. I was wondering what Demetri had to do with it...

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dmourati
Thats my first name which was what drew me to this thread!

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anigbrowl
This is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater - I'll have even less
idea why this or that comment is at the top of the feed, it will be just as
gameable for the committed bad actors, and I won't be able to get a quick
estimate of whether a social media post is worth engaging with or a crowd has
already gathered and established some rough consensus about it.

It's good to keep experimenting with the development of better UIs though -
seems to be plenty of demand for that on Twitter today as people react coolly
to their new UI.

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rgoulter
This seems like a nice improvement.

I don't think the user's experience as a 'nobody' is quite comparable to as a
celebrity. I'd waste much more of my time worrying about social media metrics
if I got more attention.

Though I also hope it doesn't exasperate competition anxiety, if people just
presume those they're competing with are more popular than they are. (My
understanding is Instagram tends to be very unhealthy for adolescents).

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outime
Even though I left social networks long time ago I welcome this change. Even
if I tried really hard not to get influenced I still ended up reading posts
with a high number of [interaction] somehow differently.

IMHO HN comments or some subreddits are good examples following this principle
(not exactly the same environment though) while maintaining some sort of
ranking.

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Nasrudith
I worry about this as a part of a larger trend of more proprietary and
enforced ignorance in service of vested interests instead of transparency in
service of all who can look and think.

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ergl
The article touches on this at the end, which I think is the most important
part:

"For social media titans, full demetrication would require a more radical
abandonment of faith in data, and a disavowal of the numbers-driven “growth
mindset” that has powered Silicon Valley for so long."

I'm conflicted on this change. On the one hand, we can see how visible like
and follower counts incentivises wrong behaviour on the user side (let's leave
aside ethical concerns about "nudging" users to the "correct" usage).

But on the other, these data points are still there for the company. They
still know how many likes, and followers you have. They randomize your
timeline to increase engagement. So this is not a radical change for them,
they are still going to use all the data points they can to push you in the
direction they want. The main thing this changes is how transparent they are
about this. For Instagram, this means pushing you to use stories more, because
it's what's driving engagement now.

Also, it's worth noting that for these companies, metrics were a vital part to
convince investors to buy into the companies: they could point to them and
say: "see? we're growing, people are engaging!". Now that they've made it,
they can afford to tune it down.

The New York Times ran an article about this back in May[0]:

"[T]oday, what you see on Twitter and Instagram already depends on a mixture
of signals — things you’ve liked in the past, how much time you’ve spent
looking at a particular user’s content, whether you communicate privately with
a given user and whether you have an affinity for some topic or another — not
just chronology, likes or retweets. Those signals are all metrics too, of a
sort, invisible to us but very much legible to the platforms themselves.
Imagine a ticker in your Instagram app counting up the number of times you’ve
scrolled, or tallying the number of times you’ve tapped, or counting up the
seconds you’ve spent looking at an image. These already exist, somewhere, and
may inform what you see every day. They’re just not for you to know.

Understood this way, the idea that metrics are the problem sounds an awful lot
like these companies saying their users can no longer be trusted, not even
with the scraps of actionable data they’ve been allowed to see for years."

[0]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/style/are-likes-and-
follo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/style/are-likes-and-followers-
the-problem-with-social-media.html)

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musingsole
Metrics with hard numbers are always too precise to be useful. Even the well-
meaning will micromanage based off the difference of a 5 or 6 on a scale of
50.

I find the key is metric obfuscation. Instead of "1023 likes", color code the
post. A deep crimson for the most downvoted and a sky blue for the most
upvoted on a site. The specific value is so useless anyway.

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jobigoud
How do you handle the high range of values? In one part of the site 1000 likes
may mean a very high number while in other, a high profile could regularly see
millions.

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musingsole
Good point, but the overall system could be adjusted any number of ways. The
point is to communicate to the user, not throw numbers at them and let them
decide what it means.

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egypturnash
Mastodon does this. It’s really nice.

So’s the non-engagement-optimized chronological timeline, of course.

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southerntofu
In a decentralized network, you don't really have a choice. Such metrics can
only be imposed with central login and "unique identity" policies.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have shadowy businesses to buy likes,
followers and whatnot. Now just imagine how that would turn out in a
decentralized setting where any script can create many accounts on several
different servers of the fediverse.

Big corps _have to_ show the metrics because their "engagement" model relies
on those number to keep people addicted. On the fediverse, there is no
incentive to make people addicts to your service, and showing the numbers
would just encourage the same kind of fake-fame industry as on those big
networks.

