I’m posting about his unique tool on the QS Blog and wanted to see what other people thought. Feel free to talk about it here.
You can read the post here: QS Blog - Living Without Numbers
QS link appears to be broken.
Fixed!
Thank you Ernesto for such interesting link.
It’s very exciting to have a whole new way to see on your page and experience of using Facebook.
Moreover, I was surprised, that this plugin can hide all the even from the Ads… Thats cool, because, by using this tool, we can exclude psychological effect known as social proof.
I don’t use facebook but I agree that we need to destroy the power of numbers in some instance, especially about things we don’t care or is actively damaging, such as farmville.
This article brings up a really interesting discussion, I think. There’s no doubt that quantification of user participation on Facebook is a huge part of user engagement. It’s the same concept of keeping score in any game - except in Facebook, “likes” and “friends” are the points a user gets for adding popular content. On the surface, I don’t necessarily think this is an inherently bad thing.
For me, the trouble here is that Facebook is supposed to be (at least according to Facebook’s press release last year about the release of Timeline) about curating and telling the story of our lives. This implies sharing content that is highly personal and valuable to our own sense of meaning. So, when all this highly personal and sensitive information is woven into a game-like environment where popular content quite literally earns you points, it brings about all kinds of unforeseen difficulties… and young kids are probably bearing the ugliest side of it right now.