Removing counts is the only viable cure for social media that’s left. Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the problem spa

Removing counts is the only viable cure for social media that’s left. Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the problem space of inputs to people who aren’t addicted, the results should be a lot less difficult to parse. Visibility into why a post is top of page should not be granted through an integer mapped on a scale of 0 to infinity at any level of precision. Not for upvotes, downvotes, replies, reposts. Not for unsolicited messages, or “X hours ago” (yes, time durations are 0..+/-inf integers, loophole denied). High score chasing will be the madness of us all. If I could write a web extension to filter every page’s counts away I would, but I cannot figure it out in my spare time. Map onto decaying average percentiles of traffic over X days, so that high-traffic posts are super bold and low traffic ones aren’t, or use 2-D colormaps (not Jet) and up/down arrows centered around 50th percentile. Relative comparison is absolutely invaluable and is a perk print newspapers don’t have. I hope HN tests this someday.