How programmer and artist Ben Grosser's 2012 idea to “demetricate” social media platforms has influenced companies to experiment with hiding visible metrics
Will Oremus / OneZero : Tweets: @dlberes , @bengrosser , and @willoremus Tweets: Damon Beres / @dlberes : I love this story by @WillOremus about demetrication. It adds a lot of relevant context to the recent Instagram news and positions it as a kind of cousin to the Time Well Spent initiative, warts and all. It's what we in the biz would call a “50-clapper”👏 https://onezero.medium.com/... Ben Grosser / @bengrosser : .@WillOremus at @ozm about my 7-year quest to demetricate social media, and how it's influenced recent efforts by Instagram and Twitter. #demetricate #demetricator #nometrics https://onezero.medium.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : Instagram and Twitter are suddenly interested in hiding like counts and other visible metrics. I wrote about the Illinois-based artist and programmer who's been pushing this idea for 7 years, and what it feels like to see it finally taken seriously. https://onezero.medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ben Grosser began arguing in 2012 that stripping visible counts off social platforms would change how people post and compare themselves — an idea that ran alongside, but never inside, the Time Well Spent-adjacent reforms Adam Mosseri later pursued at Instagram. Seven years on, OneZero traces how that outsider art project became product policy: Instagram and Twitter are both experimenting with hiding like counts.
The arc matters because it shows a critique of the attention economy being absorbed by the very companies it targeted — Instagram frames its own metric-hiding as 'depressurizing the app,' while Twitter's parallel moves sit beside a broader pivot toward low-volume, high-attention relationships over scale-obsessed feeds.
First-order effects
- Instagram and Twitter users posting during these experiments no longer see public like counts on others' posts, removing the most visible status signal from the interface while the underlying ranking systems keep counting.
Second-order effects
- Because engagement is still measured internally — as when Kevin Roose's CrowdTangle-based tweets about Facebook's top-engaging stories unsettled the News Feed team — demetrication shifts status competition backstage, pressuring creators and news accounts to chase distribution through recommendations and subscriptions instead of displayed counts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms will keep adopting well-being critiques as interface design while retaining metrics as their internal currency — leaving the measurement infrastructure intact even as it disappears from user view, which keeps debates about algorithmic accountability alive regardless of what the UI shows.
The trend: Social platforms are converting external critiques of quantified attention into cosmetic product changes, hiding metrics from users while deepening their use behind the feed.