There was a long discussion thread on Micro.blog this past week about the platform’s lack of “social” features such as likes and boosts, and how the community aspect of Micro.blog would be better if it had these sorts of features.
Everyone is, of course, free to like what they like and think what they think but for me, the absence of likes and similar stats-gathering functionality is a feature, not a bug.
Part of it is that I came to Micro.blog looking at it primarily as a place to host my blog. The timeline aspect of the platform has always seemed like an add-on to me—functionality that is there if I want it but which is not the primary (or even a particularly important) purpose of the service. As such, I can mostly take or leave all of the social aspects and have never gotten all that exercised about issues like my posts not immediately appearing in the timeline.
As for likes and boosts, I am happy not to have them. I have experimented with a plug-in that provided stats and like functionality but was happy to delete it when the developer went on a public, multi-platform rant about pronouns. I haven’t missed the functionality at all.
I do get why people think likes are a good idea. The problem is that it is very tricky to separate this kind of functionality from all the bad incentives, anti-patterns, and general unpleasantness that comes with it. Sure—the big social platforms mostly suck because they are run by terrible people willing to do anything to generate a profit but I think nearly all of the terrible behavior that happens on those sites is directly related to the bad incentives enabled by having numbers next to every post and comment.
Mostly, I guess I feel like I am surprised if anyone sees or reads any of the stuff I post, and for me, that’s not really even the point of any of it. I tend to think low-friction, don’t-have-to-think-about-it responses are worth about as much as the effort that is put into them, which is basically none at all.