Ever since I joined Twitter, nearly seven years ago, I’ve wrestled with what has always felt like a shameful interest in all those prominently displayed numbers. I’ve evaluated people I don’t know on the basis of their follower counts, judged the merit of tweets according to how many likes and retweets they garnered, and felt the rush of being liked or retweeted by someone with a large following. These metrics, I know, are largely irrelevant; since when does popularity predict quality? Yet, almost against my will, they exert a pull on me. Twitter trains its users to see numbers as currency, like so many lab rats craving reward pellets.
So, it’s worth asking: What if the numbers disappeared? How would it feel to use Twitter then? These questions recently drove Benjamin Grosser, an artist and assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to create the Twitter Demetricator, a browser extension that removes all visible metrics from the platform. It is Grosser’s latest foray into refashioning the social-media experience. In 2012, he developed a similar tool—part political statement, part art project—for Facebook. It erased every statistic from users’ screens; they could no longer see the number of likes that any posts, including their own, received, or the number of friends that other users had. Grosser built this first Demetricator in reaction to his own experience of social-media use. “There were times when I was more focused on the numbers than the content itself,” he told The Atlantic, in 2014. Others seem to have been equally concerned about this habit of mind. In the six years since the extension came out, it has been downloaded tens of thousands of times.
Twitter, perhaps even more than Facebook, runs on its users’ obsession—witting or not—with metrics. For the past few weeks, I have participated in a beta test of Grosser’s new Demetricator, which is being released to the general public today. And I have found that it has greatly altered my experience of Twitter, in both predictable and surprising ways.
To test the Twitter Demetricator, I began by activating an oversized toggle switch that hung down from my address bar, asking whether I wanted to “Hide the metrics.” Sliding the switch from “No” to “Yes” was like throwing an old-fashioned main power lever in a mechanical room. I saw a blank appear below my name as the three critical metrics—“Tweets,” “Following,” “Followers”—vanished. I felt an eerie calm: my paltry follower count was no longer there to taunt me. There was no number to worry about increasing. Below each tweet that now arrived in my feed, the “Reply,” “Retweet,” and “Like” icons were denuded of counts. If the tweet had received at least one of these, a very small dot was present in place of the number.
At first, I craved the dots; they were a lifeline to my old experience. I wanted, desperately, to know what everyone else was thinking, by which I mean that I wanted to know what was popular. But, within a short time, I found even the dots to be intrusive. The notion of knowing whether even one person had liked or retweeted something felt not just superfluous but also disruptive to what had become a serene flow of information. The cleaner interface allowed for a clearer mind. If I went to someone’s profile, I could still see the list of “Followers you know.” This, to me, reinforced the idea that the Demetricator was for fostering connection. It didn’t needlessly strip away information about people, only numbers.
Within a few days of installing the extension, I could still remember who had large followings and who didn’t, but the memories were fading. A few times, I gave in to an irresistible impulse to slide the toggle back to “Off.” If I wasn’t familiar with the author of a particular tweet, I needed to know who that person was (the “who” defined, again, by popularity). But, by the second and third week, that urge dimmed and, ultimately, disappeared.
I was so focussed on the relief of not seeing follower, like, and retweet counts that it took me a while to notice the absence of another metric that the Demetricator had removed: the age labels. When tweets were more than a day old, the date was listed, which I found helpful for perspective. Otherwise, though, the hours, minutes, and seconds were gone. It occurred to me that, unless some event happens that makes granular time really matter to regular people (a natural disaster, for example), or unless you happen to be a reporter on the breaking-news beat, that metric has exceedingly small, even potentially negative, value. Without it, I was liberated from the perpetual low-level panic induced by a false sense of urgency. Grosser told me that he expects this particular design choice to be controversial among users, but, once I got used to it, it revealed itself as a core value of the extension.
After three weeks of using the Demetricator, the nature of Twitter, for me, changed completely. In some ways, it became lonelier. Part of the fun had been feeling like part of a crowd, seeing a joke or an idea or an observation become something that fifty people, or fifty thousand, could share. But I’m willing to accept the loss of this superficial sense of community for all the gains. Not seeing any numbers at all made content itself the king. I came to appreciate, disconcertingly, that knowing what was popular before had not only often distorted but also sometimes completely overtaken my experience. With the numbers gone, I realized that they, indeed, had forced a sort of automated experience, guiding and constraining my behavior. This robotization of users, largely directed by the dominance of metrics, is, of course, endemic to social media as a whole. In a recent interview with Splitsider titled “How Facebook Is Killing Comedy,” Matt Klinman, a writer for the comedy production company Funny or Die, touched on this same point, lamenting that “a flattened internet is a predictable internet, and a flattened person is a predictable person.”
For all the emancipation that the Demetricator offered, one thing nagged at me: even though I couldn’t see any metrics, I knew that other people could still see mine. I began to wish for a master switch for the entire platform. Once the numbers are gone, one can’t help but question: Why were they there in the first place? And what would social media be like if they weren’t there at all, for anyone?
Part of the answer to the first question, Grosser said, is that a consumerist, capitalist society like ours is “already primed to evaluate things from a metric perspective.” This mind-set is particularly strong among the programmers and designers who build social-media platforms. The type of person who tends to be a high-level coder at a top tech firm, Grosser said, usually got great grades, attended a premier university, and now competes for bragging rights by trying to log the longest hours of anyone at the office. These people thrive in numbers-focussed environments. Perhaps it’s predestined that their world view would infect the user interfaces they create.
But the choice to display metrics is not only a by-product of software engineers’ psyches; it is also, of course, a deliberate decision. You may tell yourself that you don’t care about the statistics, but tech companies know that when you are forced to see them, it is impossible not to care. I am currently writing a book about self-consciousness in the modern mediated era, and my experience with the Demetricator vividly exemplifies what my research suggests—that the ultimate function of Twitter, like nearly all social-media platforms, is to make its users insecure, because insecurity compels engagement. And nothing turns up the dial on our insecurity like viewing our communications, and ourselves, as mere numbers. This gamification of our social interactions is a component of what Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, and one of the leaders of the recent whistle-blower movement in tech, was referring to when he spoke of a “social-validation feedback loop.” By making you constantly, reductively think about others, your actions, and yourself as numbers, these platforms insure that you remain permanently self-conscious.
The Demetricator works in an all-encompassing way only for those who are both motivated enough to make their own experience healthier and secure enough to not care what others think of them (a population, based on the available evidence, that one must assume is quite small). As a result, the idea of Twitter adopting any of the features of Grosser’s extension may seem absurd on its face. Is it, though? Sure, the social-media-influencer economy would implode, but, for just about all of us, that’s a net gain. Grosser told me that, counter to Silicon Valley’s prevailing wisdom, some of the users of his Facebook extension actually increased their engagement on the platform because their experience was so improved. With a demetricated Twitter, companies would still know all the analytics internally, so they could still charge the same amount to advertisers. Maybe businesses, and users hell-bent on monitoring the popularity of their accounts or various posts, could gain access to their analytics, too—but the data would be private, not publicly displayed.
What is it that we really want out of social media? Grosser’s renegade experiment forces users and designers alike to acknowledge that the visual display of personal metrics can lead to an experience that is the antithesis of the “meaningful” interaction that Twitter and other platforms ostensibly strive for. The personal numbers dehumanize us; in a society increasingly run by algorithms, we are, inevitably, beginning to function like algorithms ourselves. It’s going to take top-down, systemic changes to thwart that slide on a grand scale. Removing visible metrics shouldn’t be an extension; it should be a system upgrade.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the subject of the Splitsider interview. It was Klinman, not Funny or Die’s C.E.O., Mike Farah.
