The Upvote Dilemma

A couple of weeks ago I quietly removed the upvote count from the discovery feed on Bear. The upvote button is still there on every post, and upvotes still decide what ends up on Trending. You just can’t see the numbers next to each post anymore.

The first is that visible counts make the popular posts more popular. A post with a lot of upvotes looks like it’s worth reading, so it gets read and upvoted more, and the quiet posts with no audience stay quiet. One of the things I love about Bear, and actively curate, is that someone with no audience can still be discovered. Hiding the count means people judge a post by its title and writing, not by how many people liked it first, especially on the Newest page.

The second is that upvote numbers don't make people feel good. Someone puts sincere effort into a post, publishes it, and then sees a little “1” next to it, sitting right below someone else’s “214”. Writing shouldn’t feel like a popularity contest, and a number next to your name makes it one, whether you like it or not.

More broadly, I think the "like button" is one of the things that made the internet worse (that and infinite scroll). It turned writing and sharing into a scoreboard, and it trained a generation of platforms (and people) to optimise for the number instead of the thing itself. I’ve been critical of this in my post on social media, and it felt a bit hypocritical to have the same mechanic on Bear’s own feed.

Despite my above grievances, upvotes are useful. They’re a good, simple signal to indicate what people have enjoyed, and I haven’t found a better way to rank the feed (yet). This feels like a decent tradeoff. Upvotes still do the useful job of ranking, but they no longer act as a public scoreboard.

I was a little worried making this change (hence the quiet rollout to test it), since part of the appeal of upvoting is seeing number go up. So I compared the two weeks after the change with the month prior, and the number of upvotes per day didn’t change, the number of people upvoting didn’t change, and neither did the number of people clicking through to posts from the feed. People are reading and upvoting as much as before. They’re just not comparing scores while they do it, and upvotes are spread out among more posts than before. Great success!

It’s still early days, and I’ll keep an eye on it over the next month. But for now the numbers are staying hidden.

If you have thoughts on this, send me an email. I’d love to hear how it feels from your side, both as a reader and as a writer.