Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg

You would think that the little red box telling you how many new likes your Facebook post has would give you a sense of pride, but it turns out the number might be stressing you out.

Artist and composer Benjamin Grosser found himself using the numbers on Facebook as a personal metric for how well he was doing. Grosser said:

I focus on these quantifications, watching for the counts of responses rather than the responses themselves, or waiting for numbers of friend requests to appear rather than looking for meaningful connections.

To counteract this, Grosser created a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator, which hides all numbers on Facebook such as the length of your friends list and the number of comments and likes a post receives.

Some people embraced Grosser’s extension, saying that it lead to a stress-free Facebook, but others found the lack of numbers paralyzing—they didn’t know what to post or what to like. Grosser said “People realized when the numbers were gone, they had been using them to decide whether to like something.”

In the two years since the extension has been available, Grosser has received feedback from over 5,000 users about how Demetricator changed their habits and perceptions on Facebook. He used this data to pen a research paper on the effects of Facebook metrics for the journal Computational Culture. In his paper, Grosser argues that Facebook Demetricator “reveals and eases these patterns of prescribed sociality.”

Facebook isn’t the only social network to use numbers as an indication of a post’s success. For example, Reddit uses “karma” for both comments and submissions, allowing users to upvote or downvote a submission or comment. The post’s karma is the net result of these votes.

This has led many users to complain about the same cultural tendency Grosser described, where more attention is given to posts that are already successful. It has even led to some people reposting old content that already did well in the hope that people will still upvote it. The subreddit TheoryofReddit is dedicated to discussing how Reddit’s voting system and culture affects its content.

If you’d like to perform Grosser’s experiment on yourself, Facebook Demetricator is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.