
Show HN: Hide Likes Everywhere - dkthehuman
https://www.hidelikeseverywhere.com/
======
meritt
While I agree with the sentiment, I don't understand how this helps: all of
these platforms prioritize sort order based upon likes/popularity/engagement.
You're just putting yourself at an information disadvantage by hiding the
metrics while doing nothing to remedy that you're still primarily consuming
content based entirely on likes.

~~~
swsieber
So would you rather HN display points on comments?

~~~
thisBrian
It seemed pretty clear that the GP was saying if the platform _already_ shows
points/likes, hiding them _only_ from yourself is a disadvantage.

With that said, I believe it can function similar to all those no-
procrastination tools; allowing those that want to stop the feedback loop of
likes to ween themselves off of it. More of a personal growth tool than a
societal solution.

------
dvtrn
Is Firefox support on your roadmap, DK? I'd use this in a hurry, as someone
who meticulously hides social 'like' elements via Ublock Origin for the same
reasons as described on your page.

~~~
dkthehuman
Yup! Planning to get that done in the next several days.

I created a form if you'd like an email when the Firefox build goes live:
[https://forms.gle/aiEqoSVk6XMb5DaL8](https://forms.gle/aiEqoSVk6XMb5DaL8)

~~~
trollitarantula
Any plans to release it on Safari? :)

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gitgud
This is a good idea in theory, as it will reduce your _fomo_ and probably
jealously. But I bet if you try this for a week, you'll remember why the
like/votes metric is important...

The reason voting sites are so popular with people like you and me, is that
it's an objective measure of quality from like-minded people.

My link-clicking experience has taught me that if something is _old_ (>8
hours) with a low vote count, it might not be worth the time to look at it. By
hiding this metric, you're essentially clicking randomly in the dark...

~~~
mkolodny
Sites with likes/voting rank things for you based on what they think is worth
looking at. So as long as you're not on HN/reddit's "new" sections, you're not
randomly clicking in the dark. You're seeing the "top"/"hottest" things on
those platforms right now.

Like/vote counts add bias, induce jealousy, and make it harder for people
without reputations to get visibility. For a lot of platforms, I'd guess that
inducing jealousy helps drive engagement. Which may be why Facebook is still
only "testing" removing like counts - if removing like counts makes people who
use Facebook happier, but reduces engagement, then I doubt they'll do it.

At the same time, I agree that there is value in like/vote counts. If
something on HN has over 1,000 votes, it's very likely that I'll get value out
of reading it.

With voting systems, there are lots of tradeoffs. Most of the time,
unfortunately, platforms seem to be optimizing for engagement rather than
happiness. I wonder what would happen if they optimized for happiness instead.

~~~
gitgud
> So as long as you're not on HN/reddit's "new" sections, you're not randomly
> clicking in the dark. You're seeing the "top"/"hottest" things on those
> platforms right now.

I prefer to see a user-voted system, so I can see the general consensus of the
_community_ , rather than the consensus of the _company_ running the website.

If there's no vote/view-count or metrics shown, then how can I be sure other's
have even seen it? let alone judged it as a valuable link... to me that's
"clicking in the dark"

> Most of the time, unfortunately, platforms seem to be optimizing for
> engagement rather than happiness.

This right here is the true problem. Facebook/Reddit/Instagram all optimize
for engagement and quality content, rather than the consumer's happiness or
well-being.

I haven't personally seen a site which balances this very well. If the site is
anonymous, then reputation doesn't matter, which could reduce jealously and
bias, but these sites are much less personal.

It seems that hiding metrics will probably be better for the consumer, but the
main downside is that you're leaving the selection of content to the algorithm
on the website, rather than the votes/likes from the community...

------
greggman2
I LOVE THIS!!!

I've hidden my score/points on HN via UBlock Origin. I've also hidden the
downvote button so I can't downvote anyone (one reason I wish I could run
another browser on iOS so I could do the same there)

I want to see reasons responses to my comments not just downvotes which 5 out
of 6 times seem like ideological downvotes which is not what downvotes are
supposed to before. I'm tempted myself to click the downvote button if I
strongly disagree hence the reason I hid them from myself.

Likes are not as bad is dislikes but I hid all the points/scores on those
stack overflow too. An answer should be valid based on it's content not the
it's score or the point rep of its answerer.

I agree that there's some maybe usefulness to ordering but I'm not entire
convinced it outweighs the downsides of popularity where a celeb user gets up
votes or a popular opinion gets upvotes effectively drowning out any valid
criticism.

I really wish HN would get rid of the Q&A voting system. Bad faith comments
can be flagged. And ideally bad flaggers can be disciplined.

~~~
saagarjha
You may be able to do this with a content blocker that hides elements matching
the selector a[id^='down_'].

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maest
Wouldn't this make more sense as a ublock list/set of rules?

I don't want to install this random extension.

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dcre
See also Ben Grosser's Facebook[1], Instagram[2], and Twitter[3]
Demetricators.

[1] [https://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-
demetricator/](https://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/)

[2] [https://bengrosser.com/projects/instagram-
demetricator/](https://bengrosser.com/projects/instagram-demetricator/)

[3] [https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-
demetricator/](https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/)

------
jorgesborges
It's so hard today to constantly remind oneself how much that crap influences
our experience. It's an incessant poisoning of the well. To me the habit I
need to check most often is reading comments. If I read comments first I
engage less critically with the content, as I've already formed some opinion
and seem to know what it's about. If I read comments after I'm generally
appalled and confused by the responses and remind myself again to never read
comments.

~~~
appleiigs
I used to read HN comments first to determine if the article is worth reading.
However, if I read the article first, I have the same experience as you where
I'm very surprised how other people interpreted the article. Every once in a
while there is some enlightenment.

------
kgwxd
I made an FF add-on for myself that applies css styles to elements matching a
given regex. Currently, I only use it to apply visibility: hidden to elements
containing text or attribute values matching domains I've blacklisted,
including facebook.com, twitter.com and instagram.com. Because I have it
enabled, my version of hidelikeseverywhere.com looks like this [1]. Bonus, I
won't be able to see this comment on HN because I mention domains in the list
:)

I also have the blacklist in uBO, but I was getting sick of accidentally
clicking links I didn't realize went to sites I already knew I never wanted to
visit.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/xHF0GcX.png](https://i.imgur.com/xHF0GcX.png)

Edit: I guess this plugin has a different purpose than what I use mine for, it
assumes you want to be on the site but not be influenced by the numbers.
Because I didn't read TFA, I was thinking it was for "Follow/Like us on
Site.com" type links.

------
MuffinFlavored
I _seriously_ wonder where our society would be today if
likes/followers/retweets/pins/hearts were not a thing. I know way too many
people who take 10 photos in their best clothes on one day, then spread them
across their social media with witty captions over the next 90 days. Why? For
who? What do you gain?

------
asdf21
This is really interesting.

I wonder if this was built into the site, if people would still bother to like
/ dislike things as much?

~~~
adambyrtek
HN itself is a good example of a site with up/down voting with no counters
(unlike reddit). It would be interesting to see some research on how that
affects user behaviour.

~~~
appleiigs
I also wonder about the effect of using the net votes (like HN show on your
own posts) vs. showing the up and down votes separately.

------
alpinecode
Here are some recommendations on how to take control of your device/apps:
[https://humanetech.com/resources/take-
control/](https://humanetech.com/resources/take-control/)

------
throwaway8291
These metrics are signals. Interestingly, we already have an extreme
information asymmetry between platforms and users. The softened version of
these moves is to make the experiences more authentic, the less soft version
is to increase the information asymmetry even more.

You as an individual will be a bit sharper, if what you do is not just herd
behaviour - but more coming from your true self, you know.

Anyway, the idea is still ok and the site looks nice, congrats on putting it
out there.

------
anonytrary
This won't prevent you from being manipulated by vanity metrics. All of the
metrics have already been crunched -- the 20 posts at the top of /r/all are
there because they've been validated by everyone else using the site (in the
form of likes, activity, and other metrics). Hiding some divs and spans won't
change the posts you see at the top of /r/all.

------
firefoxd
Even if you are strong willed, seeing the number of likes and reshares will
endup influencing you in the long term. However, hiding those numbers is
putting a band aid on it.

If you are at a point, where you think those numbers are influencing you so
badly that you need an extension, try to re-evaluate how how you are spending
your time. Maybe you need to work on avoiding those websites in the first
place.

~~~
impeachee
As a counterpoint, if you recognize it could be problematic in the future, the
extension could be used as a preventive measure.

------
RobKohr
If you use StyleBot you can add css to sites to remove particular elements
such as like counts. It might be fun to just start zapping away lots of stuff
that you don't want to see.

------
ARandomerDude
The downside is this hides who reacted to what, and in what way. Usually
that's more important to me than the count. If I know several pretty sharp
people (dis)like something, and I disagree, I stop and ponder why. It doesn't
mean they're necessarily right, but helps me identify potential holes in my
thinking.

------
kempbellt
This is a cool idea.

Gameifying popularity in virtual environments is a cringeworthy trend in the
modern world. Nice to see a little push back.

Reminds me of Myspace's "Top 8" that everyone tried to gameify and took way
too seriously back in grade school. People that had removed it altogether were
usually more pleasant people to interact with in person.

------
mindgam3
This is a seriously great idea and looks well executed.

Just to add to the chorus of Firefox requesters. I’m sure you have limited dev
resources but the spirit of this concept is very aligned with Firefox and less
so Chrome. So it might be worth your time even if chrome has greater market
share.

Look forward to seeing where you go with this project.

~~~
dkthehuman
Thanks for the kinds words! Planning on releasing on Firefox in the next
several days and I created a quick form if you'd like an email when it's
ready:
[https://forms.gle/aiEqoSVk6XMb5DaL8](https://forms.gle/aiEqoSVk6XMb5DaL8)

~~~
mindgam3
Sweet! Will do.

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asdfasgasdgasdg
It would be good if this only requested permission to read the relevant sites,
instead of all sites. I tried using Chrome's options to manually restrict the
allowed sites but the extension could not tolerate it and stopped working.

~~~
dkthehuman
Hey, I built it with the intention of eventually allowing anyone to modify any
site they wish (thus the request for all sites), but I think I'll just make
that into a separate extension and tighten up the permissions for this one.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
No problem! I've been wanting something like this for a long time so you
inspired me to at least add these signals to my personal ublock list. :)

------
Wordball
where is the source code brother

~~~
bluntfang
agreed that they should open the source. I imagine it's a pretty simple app. a
mapping of css selectors with a single line that runs on page load, something
like this:

    
    
        document.querySelectorAll(css_selector).remove()
    

the hard part would be maintaining the css selectors. This is probably and
arms race situation, where websites will obfuscate their elements in such a
way where identifying the elements you want is nigh impossible, but that would
probably take more engineering than it's worth. What's really interesting is
that facebook does not scrub their `data-testid` attributes, so you can
basically key on that since they probably test that part of the application
extensively, and probably run smoke tests/chaos engineering on their live app
so removing them might be impossible in their current implementation.

right now on facebook the appropriate js code would be:

    
    
        document.querySelectorAll('*[data-testid="fbFeedStoryUFI/feedbackSummary"]').forEach(element => element.remove())

~~~
Mathnerd314
The extension code is minified but AFAICT it's just injecting some CSS sheets,
primarily element hiding rules with display:none but also some spacing fixes.
E.g. the Facebook one is

    
    
        [data-testid="fbFeedStoryUFI/feedbackSummary"] {
            display: none
        }
    

It's not clear why the developer chose to inject the stylesheets dynamically
and magnify the footprint 10x by including a polyfill library, rather than
using the manifest to specify them declaratively, but whatever.

~~~
dkthehuman
To satisfy your curiosity: The reason I don't inject the stylesheets
declaratively is because you can't disable them and I wanted to give people a
way to toggle the hiding functionality.

------
coolswan
Hiding likes to avoid bias towards "liking" a post is good. Preventing likes
is not good. This seems like a good balance - still allows for ppl to
unbiasedly like and for the algos to try to send me good stuff.

------
juped
Resaturating HN text would be a useful feature to support (the worst part of
this innovative practice is that when you highlight it to try to make it more
readable it becomes even less readable)

~~~
reificator
If you have an extension like Stylus installed, you can quickly write a new
rule. This might also change the saturation of other elements, but I'd be
surprised if you wouldn't consider that a benefit.

The desaturation is just a collection of rules like the following:

    
    
        .c88, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited {
            color: #888888;
        }
    

If you want to make it darker you could just use the following in a Stylus
rule for news.ycombinator.com:

    
    
        .c5a, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited,
        .c73, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited,
        .c82, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited,
        .c88, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited,
        .c9c, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited,
        .cae, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited,
        .cbe, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited,
        .cce, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited,
        .cdd, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited {
            color: #000000 !important;
        }

~~~
juped
Yes, I should probably do this. Thanks.

------
davegri
This is awesome, can you make it work on the old reddit design as well?
old.reddit.com

------
daxfohl
I would have "liked" this post but....

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TheUndead96
@dkthehuman Do you plan on releasing a Firefox version?

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somberi
The name, Hide Likes Everywhere at a first glance seems like a grammatical
error. Once I understood it, it reminded me of this Groucho Marx saying:

Time flies like an Arrow. Fruit flies like Banana.

------
ifthenelseend
when will hacker news finally remove like buttons? there is a reason why
studies are performed using double blind technique.

