I feel such an aversion to the idea of having numbers on social media now. Please do not allow me to know how popular I am compared to other people. Seeing numbers on everyone's likes sounds awful.
it also has this cool effect that because you cannot directly see or measure who is popular, it's not clear who to imitate to do numbers, and therefore more people are just kinda doing... whatever works for them, subjectively.
and this is so much more interesting than, say, reddit which has an established canon of "correct" joke replies that follow a specified format
and super personally I think it's cool that I don't really know which of my followers are a "big deal" or not and it helps me to engage with folks on a more even level, and that feels very nice! I hope people who had big accounts elsewhere also find this nice.
Even better: without public-facing metrics, the people who I see as "a big deal" aren't the ones Getting Likes or Posting Hot Takes, but the ones who I interact with frequently.
Which is like... how making friends and acquaintances works IRL!
Which is way more healthy!!
