Hide Likes

There’s really no point in denying it, but social media is a very big part of our lives for most of us. Yes, the divide between digital and real-life behavior is still there and, yes, cognitive dissonance is still a thing on social media, but the truth is that we often tend to give value to everything based on what is today’s most powerful metric – the LIKE.

We’re not just talking about the likes you receive for your nice profile picture, but also the ones that tend to recommend certain brands, products, and even various types of online content as more valuable than others. Granted, these metrics really matter as they can be used to judge success (i.e. from a content marketing perspective), but they can also be quite detrimental to your mood, perception, and ultimately even your behavior.

Without going into too many psychology-related details, giving likes, followers, and other “vanity meters” as they’re called can really take you down a path where you prioritize the wrong things in life.

Thankfully, there’s a neat little tool for reversing that effect, and it’s called Hide Likes. Designed to provide a bit more clarity and authenticity to your online experience, this Chrome extension hides likes, comments, shares, number of followers, retweets, views, subscribers, upvotes, and basically all other similar metrics from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram.

It’s extremely easy to install from the Chrome Web Store and it lives in your browser’s toolbar as unobtrusively as possible. A simple click on the extension’s icon grants you a quick way to enable or disable its effects for all the supported websites.

In the end, hiding all these metrics is a very personal decision, and whatever you choose, we hope it’s for the best. However, even though not having them might feel a bit weird at first, there’s a small chance that some effects should be visible. Not having access to likes and similar info might allow you to focus more on sharing yourself online in a more authentic manner, and even change the way you view yourself.