Upvotes on Bear Blog

Cheers to Herman and his latest approach to upvotes on Bear Blog.

I started this blog on Bear, and I still think it’s a wonderful service. I appreciate Herman’s thoughtful, principled approach to building and evolving it. I struggled with the upvotes, though. I don’t love upvoting in general and have written about that a few times.

Herman’s new approach is to allow upvoting but hide the upvote numbers on Bear’s Discovery page. From his post:

I made this change for two reasons.

The first is that visible counts make the popular posts more popular. A post with a lot of upvotes looks like it’s worth reading, so it gets read and upvoted more, and the quiet posts with no audience stay quiet. One of the things I love about Bear, and actively curate, is that someone with no audience can still be discovered. Hiding the count means people judge a post by its title and writing, not by how many people liked it first, especially on the Newest page.

The second is that upvote numbers don’t make people feel good. Someone puts sincere effort into a post, publishes it, and then sees a little “1” next to it, sitting right below someone else’s “214”. Writing shouldn’t feel like a popularity contest, and a number next to your name makes it one, whether you like it or not.

Amen.

Check out the rest of his post for more good thoughts.