Anonymous User asked: What are your thoughts on the idea that "Number Go Up" Validation (for lack of a better term) would improve Cohost's new user attraction and/or existing user retention?
we had that for a weekend when we shipped Numbers™️ on april 1. they were completely fake, literally just a random number generator doing dice rolls against a post ID and incrementing progressively over time.
and the most common piece of feedback we got was "despite knowing that these numbers are completely fake and baed on literally nothing, seeing them made me feel Actively Worse."
i took this as a victory lap that my general theory of "numbers bad" held weight. we took away numbers, users either embraced it or got used to it. we reintroduced numbers via made-up bullshit, users hated it and started taking psychic damage again. no more numbers.
