My Demetricators for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were featured in the March issue of Wired

My work on social media demetrication—and the writer’s experience of using it—is the subject of a feature article in the March issue of Wired Magazine. In a piece titled I Am Immeasurable: My Life Online—Without all the Metrics, Senior Associate Editor Arielle Pardes talks about her ups and downs with metrics-free social media. Pardes writes of how it felt after she demetricated:

It took a second. The rivers of tweets and ’grams still flowed, dragging along the usual cyberpollution. I composed a tweet with a link to a story I’d written, then refreshed the page and waited for my digital pat on the back. It never arrived. Where once I hovered my cursor, waiting for the dopamine hits, there was only blankness. … Not that I immediately stopped searching for approval. When someone new followed me on Twitter, I’d make my way to their follower count … only to find nothing. I’d dreamily wonder how many people liked my latest Instagram post or whether I was the first or 500th to retweet a joke. With the demetricators engaged, I found my cursor circling vacant space, waiting to be told how to think. The emptiness made apparent how much I’d depended on those numbers.

There’s plenty more; I don’t want to spoil it. Read the whole thing.

I should also note that Pardes and others talked discussed my Twitter Demetricator a few months ago for a segment on the Wired Gadget Lab Podcast. You can listen here (link should jump right to it, but just in case, it starts at 31:05).