The Number That Stares Back
Johnny wrote something in late 2012 that I still think about. A post called "2013: Das Web zurückerobern"—reclaim the web—that laid out, quietly and precisely, everything that had already gone wrong: Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr dissolving real thought into timelines, creating dependence on the decisions of a handful of corporations, drowning discourse in the noise of everyone shouting for attention at the same time. He was right, and nothing changed.
The like button is the instrument of all of it. It arrived as a small helpful thing—a quick affirmative gesture, a way to spread something you cared about—and somewhere in the years since, it became a verdict. A number sitting next to your words, telling you and everyone else how much those words are worth. In a world where everyone is screaming into the void, the number is the only thing that screams back.
And once that number exists, you start writing toward it. Not consciously, at first. But gradually, invisibly, you stop publishing the thing that delighted only you and a few strangers. You don’t write the small weird piece that matters to nobody obvious. You share the video that already circulated everywhere because at least you know it will land. The self-censorship isn’t dramatic—it’s an accumulation of tiny decisions, each one individually reasonable, collectively ruinous.
Likes don’t make you happy. It doesn’t matter whether ten thousand people click the thing or whether the counter reads zero. Ten thousand is just a new floor you have to beat next time. Sixty thousand and you’re already wondering why it wasn’t eighty. And zero—zero is a different thing. Zero just sits there. It doesn’t argue. It stares.
Likes work the way money works, the way praise works, the way sex works: having some only makes you want more, you’re never satisfied, one more, just one more, come on. And when the number stops climbing, you sit there and wonder what you did wrong. What you posted too early, too late, at the wrong angle, with the wrong first sentence. You audit yourself like a broken machine.
While you’re running that audit, the possibility of becoming a little more like BuzzFeed—optimized, frictionless, click-bait trimmed to a fine point—starts to feel less monstrous than it did. Just a slightly more legible headline. A bigger thumbnail. That’s not who you are yet. But zero keeps staring.
The photo you took, the text you wrote, the thing that lit something up inside you and apparently nobody else: how stupid of you to think it mattered. Likes are the currency, and if you don’t have them, you’re on the wrong side of the ledger. Zero likes—the generation’s ultimate verdict, delivered by people who share "First Kiss" videos and political satire and watch teenagers fail on YouTube.
René killed the like button on his blog and named four reasons: it added no value, it pushed his writing toward easy emotional bait, it contributed to the industrialization of web culture, and it suppressed the conditions necessary for actual discussion. He was right on all four counts.
It would be naive to pretend the big networks don’t matter, that their reach isn’t real, that you don’t sometimes want people to read what you write. Yes. All of that is true. But the high from a lot of people clicking a small box on a screen is brief and hollow, and the crash when your expectations aren’t met is disproportionate and stupid—and you built those expectations yourself, without anyone’s help.
Likes aren’t real. I don’t want to feel bad about something I wrote on my own website. I don’t want to open a post I put something of myself into and find a handful of thumb icons and feel the specific shame of that number. Because at some point that feeling makes you stop publishing the things the algorithm ignores—and the more of those you don’t publish, the less of yourself actually exists here.
Blogging from the gut means writing things nobody asked for, things that fit only you, things that are yours even when they’re nobody else’s. That’s the whole point. The diversity that makes any of this worth reading lives entirely in those posts—the ones with no traction, no shares, the ones that mattered to the person who wrote them and maybe to three people they’ll never meet.
So I removed the like button and the Twitter counter from this journal. Good for my sanity, probably neutral for traffic, definitely right. In their place: a small row of share links at the bottom, no counters, no verdicts, just the option. No numbers staring back.
I know how this works. I know which words to use, how to position something for maximum surface area, which emotions move fastest. The harder thing—the thing that’s actually worth trying—is to be worth reading without pulling any of those levers. To find the audience by being exactly what you are. Good luck to me.