Facebook Demetricator in Cosmo (p. 37, June 2016)

Facebook Demetricator is discussed in the June 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan, in an article by Sarah Z Wexler titled “You Are Not Your Likes” (pp. 36-37). Wexler writes:

Although I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to checking my digits, my boyfriend has definitely rolled his eyes at me for pausing our conversation to check how my Instagram or FB post is doing. So to stop tracking my Likes, I installed the Facebook Demetricator, a free web add-on that removes Like tallies from Facebook. It was created by artist Ben Grosser, who recognized how social media plays into our “insatiable desire to make numbers go higher.”

I posted an article I’d written that I was really proud of, and when I checked back later it didn’t say “32 people Liked this” but just “people Liked this.” I opened Facebook two more times during the day, but without an updated tally to track my progress, it wasn’t actually that rewarding and I didn’t care about checking back on it—I actually fell asleep without having checked for hours. The numbers for how many people commented on my post were also erased, but I did still catch myself trying to gauge how I was doing by counting the comments. (emphasis added)

Thanks to Katie Gamble for pointing the article out to me—I wouldn’t have known it was there otherwise (this article isn’t online and I’m not a regular reader).

Update: Cosmo has now published the story online, with a new title as Why Your Likes Don’t Actually Mean Anything.