How to Hide Likes and Make Social Media Less Stressful

Social media should be fun, but it’s often more stressful than anything. This can often come from the people you follow or the constant stream of distracting notifications.

But there’s another potentially upsetting core part of social sites that you might not have noticed: the pervasive numbers for likes, tweets, etc. Let’s take a look at why this is a problem and how to change it.

How Numbers Add Pressure on Social Media

It’s hard to realize just how pervasive metrics are on Facebook and Twitter until you take a hard look at their interfaces.

You can see just how popular your latest profile picture is by how many people like it. Comparing your amount of friends to someone else’s is simple. And if tens of thousands of people retweeted a tweet, it must be true and accurate, right?

Seeing numbers makes it easy to focus on quantity rather than quality. We don’t care that a friend we haven’t talked to in a while liked a photo of our vacation—we care that 100 people liked it. You can change this with a pair of extensions.

How to Hide Likes and Tweet Counts on Social Media

1. Visit the Facebook Demetricator or Twitter Demetricator download pages to install the extensions in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.
2. Load Facebook or Twitter after installing the extension.
3. You’ll notice that almost all numbers are gone. For example, 55 comments under a post becomes just comments. You can still access them, but you won’t see any numbers.
4. If you decide you want the numbers back, just uncheck the Demetricator box at the top of either site to restore them temporarily. Of course, you can remove the extension if you decide you don’t like it at all.

You’ll find out shortly if this helps you feel less stressed on social media. The lack of knowing exactly how many messages you need to respond to or how many likes your latest selfie got might just give you peace of mind.

For more, check out how to fix common Facebook problems.

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