Likes

I don’t have notifications on for likes or boosts. I go in and check them manually. There’s no need for that stuff to reach me, especially not one-by-one when it’s more efficient to look at them batched. It’s there when I need it.

Last year as an experiment I went one month without looking at likes. There were some downsides to the experiment because I didn’t know if I was saying dumb shit that made everyone feel sad & awkward & hurt or if people liked what I was saying.

I ended up deciding this: I would want to see likes and boosts by only the people who was mentioned in the post. If I say something to or about a friend and they don’t reply, that’s worrying but if they like the post, that’s like a nod or an “mmm-hmm” or a “yeah”, that’s fine. I would want to hide other likes and boosts. Not that I don’t appreciate them, they’re great, keep ‘em coming, but they’re a li’l bit unprecedented in how humans have historically interacted. I don’t wanna get shaped by “what’s popular” and I have other things to read, like books or games.

I forgot about that conclusion since I couldn’t come up with a way to readily implement it, and I just went back to looking at the likes once per day or so.