Metrics make social media worse
One of the many things I miss about Cohost was how it did not display follower/following counts, shares, or like counts. Hiding those metrics, even though the features behind them did exist on the site, was an active choice rather than a temporary experiment or artifact of some other design decision. For something that feels at first like such a small change, the omission had a significant impact on the actual experience of using the site.
In my experience, visible metrics contribute to a worse experience at the platform level. Like and follow "policing", where who you follow or what posts you like is monitored and criticized by others (sometimes even to the point of harassment), is only possible if those are displayed publicly. Visible like and share counts paired with quote reposts can lead to dunking or trying to ratio someone, which really just leads to increase the reach of the original bad post. There are a number of people on Bluesky I ended up unfollowing due to how frequently they did this (if only Bluesky let you choose to hide reposts or quote reposts from certain users on the following feed).
I also believe that visible metrics make for a worse individual user experience, as they're just more numbers visible beneath each post that aren't actually actionable in any way. It does me no good to know how many likes or reposts a post has, but it noticeably increases the visual noise of the feed. The only metric that is actually meaningful to me is the comment/reply count, since that indicates if there are replies to read or if there were any new ones since I last saw the post. And while it can feel good to see a dunk or standalone good post with many likes and shares, it feels even worse to see a cruel post with lots of likes and shares than it would feel to just see the post on its own. Put another way: comparison is the thief of joy, and metrics are one more way to compare posts.
I wish that more social media sites would follow Cohost in simply hiding all of these metrics. Tumblr is maybe the major site closest to doing this, with no follower count and post metrics being collapsed into a single "notes" value; while Bluesky chose to run the other way, making everything public as an essential part of its design (but they'll ban people for making use of that!).
Until sites actually remove metrics, I recommend making use of tools like the Bluesky demetricator userscript. Switching to a new phone that didn't have the userscript installed was what reminded me about how much I dislike visible metrics and pushed me to write this post in the first place. Hiding metrics moves the focus onto the posts themselves and makes browsing social media that much more enjoyable. If only more sites would prioritize this over chasing VC money and finding tricks to increase engagement and user session length. One can dream.