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.
i was here for that. it was genuinely shocking to me how much a number fucked with my head even though i knew meant literally nothing. i knew as the prank went live that it was some random number assigned to the post via RNG, and that the number would increse or decrease in value by one every second or so, and that receiving a positive or negative number was also determined by the RNG.
and yet, when one of my posts started with a low number or even a negative number, i felt like shit about it! i compared my numbers to other post numbers and was sad my number was arbitrarily smaller! it sounds silly on its face - because it's REALLY silly - but like, imagine my surprise when i felt its effects first-hand.
made me feel honored for having participated in such an interesting thought experiment, and disappointed in myself for giving so much of a shit about a literally arbitrary, meaningless, random number and letting it have more weight on my self-worth than it should've ever had (which should have been exactly 0)





