Bye, The Numbers!
I was going to write a short post about how I'm not normal about upvotes, but mantis beat me to it. They nailed a lot of the same points I was going to, including a link to the post that taught me how to remove the number of upvotes from my blog posts.
For most of my posting career here at bearblog, I declined to include my posts on the discover feed. During my most prolific bout of posting, I would only turn discovery on for my Sunday links posts, just as sort of a reminder that I'm still here. If I left upvotes enabled on the posts I was actually proud of, I would get locked in a sick loop of checking for validation and self-doubt. If I posted something I thought was good but didn't get any upvotes, I'd start to question all of my life choices and abilities; which the logical part of my brain knows is ridiculous. There are a million reasons a post might not get many or any upvotes. Maybe I posted it at a time not many people were looking at the discover feed. Maybe it was a subject not many people are interested in.1 Maybe a small percentage of people who read think to actually click the button. I know it's not a true measurement of my ability or value as a person, but when you have CPTSD, anxiety and historical self-esteem issues, your brain tunes all these logical possibilities and focuses on the ones that mean there's a problem with me. Blogging was meant to be my escape from social media, where this constant validation dance is all-encompassing, so for the most part I simply opted out.
I knew it must be possible to hide the number of upvotes with CSS, but there was another problem: I could see my own posts and the number of upvotes they get on the discover feed. Hiding the number of upvotes on the blog page would just mean I'd have to constantly refresh that page instead of the page with the post.
Well, the discovery page now has the ability to filter out posts by account. I don't know when this was added, but I think it must've been during my hiatus, because I don't remember it being there. This is a great feature which makes the discovery page usable, because I can filter out the spam, genAI slop, posts by people who forget to set their posting language, and people who write blogs where every sentence is given its own paragraph. And, of course, I can filter myself out. I added myself to the list of blogs I would like hidden from the feed, and now I'm free. The button is still there, and if you like my post, it would still mean a lot to me if you clicked it! It would mean other people have a chance to see my stuff, and that's awesome. But I'm no longer beholden to the number. I don't have to worry about my dumb brain desperately refreshing the page to see if the number has gone from 1 to 2. I no longer get irrationally depressed if the number stays at 1, because I can't see that it is.
I think, maybe, but I don't know, but I'm starting to feel like I got a brain problem situation on my hands 🦝
As a neurodivergent person, this is an outcome I often have to accept, and I'm trying hard to treat it as a difference to be celebrated and not some kind of dire personality flaw that will prevent me from ever forming a true, meaningful connection with another person (trivia fact: the title of this blog is a reference to this feeling)↩