Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/escaping-twitters-numbers-ga.html
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What is this Twitter that you speak of?
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I’m chiming in along similar lines: I suppose it would be the height of stupidity to merely suggest not using Twitter?
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I pay no attention to the numbers, myself, but I feel like I would like this plugin to instead replace them with fuzzy ranges, from “a few” up to “really quite a lot”.
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“Twitter: the feeling that every moment is a self-conscious baring of oneself in pursuit of the metrics and measurements”
I can think of at least one foolproof way to avoid this.
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Thanks for the reminder Rob (and of course for making it in the first place!), txt.fyi is a bona fide “wonderful thing” and yet one that I regularly forget to use when I need something exactly like it!
Oh no! donotwant.gif
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I won’t, but do plan on making something else with user accounts at another domain. I don’t know to what extent user accounts would be exposed, but I think as minimally as possible to provide useful functionality. There are already much better, more powerful, more beautiful tools that do all this: the whole appeal is in knowing it will never do certain things
txt.fyi is more or less inviolate in its current form with few changes (it could stand to be smarter about formatting markdown and code snippets, but I quietly suspect that it is prose folk who like it most anyway)
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I signed up for twitter once. Within 2 days I discovered I was posting porn in a foreign language. I immediately killed the account and never looked back.
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Cool - IMO it already “Do[es] one thing and do[es] it well^H^H^H^Hsuperbly” 
Would love to hear sometime what sort of usage you see, how many publishes, how many views they get etc. (no pressure of course, just idle curiousity).
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I don’t know! In the spirit of the thing I don’t track any of it, though maintenance stuff provides vague insights and an occasional glimpse, and presumably there are server logs that could be pulled. There’s a slow, steady flow of stuff being published. A (seemingly small) proportion is snippets of nonsense, close to empty.
One interesting behavior I noticed. Because txt.fyi is extremely simple http, using no javascript or third party calls, and because nothing is publicized systematically, it is reliable and pseudo-private enough for people to just publish and then use the back button to “edit”, creating a series of published slowly improving drafts.
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Mais oui - perfect 
You might find this interesting - quite a different proposition of course (it’s a freelance jobs board), but it’s attracting a lot of attention by virtue of being a flourishing, profitable, well-regarded app… that apparently consists of a single PHP page!
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Now the pressure’s on to come up with something clever to say about this app so I can get 25 likes and a “Good Reply” badge.
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Why not? That’s exactly what the circular who’s-on-first script this board seems to go through every time Facebook comes up…
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I think that exposed social metrics are fundamentally bad, but also that they are generally harmless fun within affinity groups, forums and other places with the tribal belonging feel. It’s when enviuronments grow beyond this level that the metrics and technology of engagement start to dissolve social norms and reshape behavior in unpredictable and uncanny ways.
In the past, the “silent” problem of internet forums was that the technology was not broadly adopted outside of technical and middle-class audiences, so they tended to reflect a certain slice of society and its entitlements – they tended to be dominated by “Gilfoyles”, activists and people who live in the unevenly distributed future. But I think this problem is gone, now, internet access is in everyone’s pocket but for people so poor they are already broadly excluded from society.
So smaller communities are ready for revival and perhaps the web’s last hope, so long as they are self-governed.The challenge is to get people out of corporate social media before they permanently occupy the public space or collapse in a way that damages it.
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It is preaching to the converted on BB, but with every passing day my conviction grows that the major social media companies are a plague upon the land.
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Uh, dude. It is the motherfucking internet!!! The DEFINITION of exposed!!! Jeeze.
I mean exposed in the sense of “anyone can see the social metrics” not to the social environment itself.
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Good save there 
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But I’d also argue that anyone that really, really wants to can see the social metrics. Ah, wait, that was your argument in the first place, I think. I’ve really been up far, far too long. I’m going to watch some more Young Sheldon. He’s me, but actually really smart.
