Apr 15, 2018
To test the Twitter Demetricator, I began by activating an oversized toggle switch that hung down from my address bar, asking whether I wanted to “Hide the metrics.” Sliding the switch from “No” to “Yes” was like throwing an old-fashioned main power lever in a mechanical room. I saw a blank appear below my name as the three critical metrics—“Tweets,” “Following,” “Followers”—vanished. I felt an eerie calm: my paltry follower count was no longer there to taunt me. There was no number to worry about increasing. Below each tweet that now arrived in my feed, the “Reply,” “Retweet,” and “Like” icons were denuded of counts.