mantis land

I am not normal about upvotes (or likes, or favourites)

Today's thingy: Woolly mice!1

3 woolly mice hanging out, cleaning themselves and being very cute

Update - 7th March 2025 at 04:56 After posting this, I spent the rest of the day refreshing the discover page to see its ranking and likes. Learning from matt bee's parallel experience with metrics, I'm going to filter my own blog off my discovery page (realistically, I will undo this a lot, but the friction might at least give me pause). Now to find a way to stop myself from abusing inspect element...
Another update - 7th March 2025 at 11:19 I've filtered myself out and then used uBlock Origin to block the element. Yay for definitely having very strong built-in self-control.
ANOTHER another update - 8th March 2025 at 04:21 The irony of my post about how I'm insane about metrics being the one to put me on Trending is not lost on me. Either way, thank you for reading! (I know I'm not meant to look but I obviously was going to. #3 last I checked, what!!!)

I'm way too obsessed with checking how my posts are doing. Whenever I put something out, especially something I put any amount of effort into, I check it again and again whenever I'm reminded of it. Where there are likes and dislikes to be had, I am watching.

So when I realised that there were upvotes2 on bearblog.dev (AND a trending page where that number mattered), I was hooked. I'd type in my own URL over and over again to look at the number under my posts, to see if anyone else thought what I had to say was good. I was reading them over again trying to figure out if they would hold someone's attention long enough to get to the good parts, if I'd like it if I was on the other side of the screen, always changing some things each time when they inevitably didn't hold up to the scrutiny. I realised then that I was being kind of dumb with it. I have two posts up total, have only shared the link to my blog with 1 person, and the kicker: it's not something I even care about.3

Part of the reason I wanted to make an online space of my own is to get myself away from that checking behaviour. In my head, likes appeal to to humans' social needs because it delivers an imitation of the rewards of a social interaction without the interaction itself, telling you you've been heard and accepted, that you're in. But really, so many people like and reply to things for so many reasons that it's basically meaningless, and I've had my experiences going viral enough times to know it's mostly luck that determines that the right people see it at the right time to start the popularity ball rolling. Despite knowing all this, I still check.

I don't like it, but right now I'm a kind of non-Newtonian person, only solid when someone pushes back. It's sometimes great (like last week, when I floated through the day on the glowing feedback I got on an essay), but it's mostly terrifying, because if I'm not constantly pushed around by the world, I'll disappear down a storm drain. I'm sure it's a necessarily human thing, to want to wait for approval before really letting yourself stand behind your own work, and to want to have yourself unambiguously approved, but it's not helpful when I'm using the performance of my internet doings as a proxy measure for my worth as a person.

All this to say: I've taken off the upvote count on my blog4 because I want to keep this space for myself. I don't need to know if there's an amount5 of people who like a given post, because it's just for me to put it out there. What other people think about it is none of my business.6

Feel free to like my posts if you'd like, I won't know.

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  1. These little guys were gene-edited into existence by a "de-extinction" company in their effort to bring back the woolly mammoth. I don't know why they'd do that (isn't it a bit hot for them nowadays?), or if this is actually a big step in that process, but I saw a picture of one of them and it made me cry because it was so cute.↩

  2. upvotes on one of Herman's posts<- They look like this, by the way.↩

  3. It might be more accurate to say it's not something I want to care about.↩

  4. Here's the post that taught me how from a fellow bearblog user.↩

  5. I say "amount" and not "number" because with likes and similar metrics, it doesn't feel like a count of individual people, but rather like I'm collecting some kind of mass.↩

  6. I say this, but I'd love to talk to people about shared interests and interesting topics. I'm not yet sure how to open myself up for communication (I'd be open to suggestions if there was a way to give me any), but I'll find a way sometime. Maybe a forum?↩

#perfectionism #social-media