Made another important decision to remove all counters — notes, replies, following, followers — from both people and hashtags, so you focus on the content not the numbers. It was creating competition which feeds the dopamine system, which we have exhausted and try to avoid.
The rationale is clear. However, I have found it useful in other arenas to have a total-post-count of the user on show as it easily enables me to avoid following people who favour quantity over quality. Even a posts-per-day number would do the same job.
The numbers simply confuse, create bias and competition. Now you simply go to their profile, read their notes and decide by their content if that person is interesting to you. Having no place else to judge the focus necessarily turns to the content. That’s what matters most.
Also removed the relative timestamps and reply counts. We’re number-free. Numbers introduce unnecessary bias. Now the focus is on the content.
No reply counts I could get used to, but no timestamps? Now we're in uncharted waters...
Why do you need it? It’s just for stalking when someone was online and might bias to ignore older posts that could still be in —not knowing the time also makes it easier to reply whenever you feel, less pressure. I don’t have time on my desktop either, hate time :p
Hm idk, various things. If someone finds posts from months/years ago, timestamps put them in context (what "current events" are on their mind &c). Also hints if it's still fresh in mind when you reply, or if it'll be a blast from the past. (Arg for YYYYMMDD, perhaps not HHMMSS.)
That’s what I’m hoping for! Resurrecting old interesting discussions based on their content. And also not ignoring posts that are not fresh, e.g responding to a “good morning” post. If you see “5h” you would ignore it. Now you don’t know. Let’s see how it goes for a few days.
I want to avoid the “rush” of living on the edge all the time. Want to slow things down, put some thought, make browsing a profile look like reading one’s thoughts like a book. To feel timeless.
I personally enjoy the lack of timestamps.
But if this becomes a problem, maybe vague descriptions would be useful. "fairly recent", "sometime ago", "this is ancient", etc.
That was . I’m thinking to restore them just for historical posts so that there is some context when they were written and what was happening then, perhaps after a month, and inside the post details page, not in the feeds.
If that's the case,
YearMonth should be more than enough. This post is from 2026-08. This gives you enough context of what was happening at the time, but with no more context than necessary.
I'm suggesting that as a compromise. I really like the absence of likes, timestamps, counters, and so on.
Text is timeless. I don't need the precise timestamp of the Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nasir to laugh at Nanni and his messenger being treated with contempt.Thank for keeping it cool @stagasprofilefollow
creative technologist
creator of textlog. Unfortunately this is a message that doesn’t add much to the conversation, but I still want to express my appreciation for avoiding things that leads to a strive for more, more, more.
creative technologist
creator of textlog. Unfortunately this is a message that doesn’t add much to the conversation, but I still want to express my appreciation for avoiding things that leads to a strive for more, more, more.this became the catalyst to join! I can already see that this is the type of place I at least want to lurk.
congrats @stagasprofilefollowcreative technologist
creator of textlog more power to you, let's not build another "gamified" thing... no numbers to bump, in fact... you can think of it like "what makes the network LESS attractive to AI dissinformation campaigns", no value in selling you "a profile with thousands of followers".
creative technologist
creator of textlog more power to you, let's not build another "gamified" thing... no numbers to bump, in fact... you can think of it like "what makes the network LESS attractive to AI dissinformation campaigns", no value in selling you "a profile with thousands of followers".As others have said, this made me join (textlog has been open in a tab for weeks now without my creating an account). I'm on the fence about timestamps but everything else is great. The lack of dopamine from not being able to like or get liked is both painful and incredibly freeing. Also, I LOVE the design of this site.
numbers
In a past life, when I was a statistician, I often though that the primary goal of statistics was to communicate numerical ideas without actually using any numbers. Numbers make people anxious, manufacture false certainty, project false confidence. They invariably appear to say something that's related to but not quite exactly the truth.
I love the experiment of just not having them. I also wonder about the experiment of: could something fuzzier, less fraught replace them?