Demetricators Featured in Wired Magazine

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).