I recently saw a viral video listing "startup ideas that don't exist," and one was a social media platform without metrics (no likes, no followers, no counts) to fix social anxiety.
I’ve actually built this before. I had the same hypothesis: if we remove the dopamine-chasing metrics, people will engage in pure, meaningful conversation.
I was wrong. Here is what happened:
The 4chan Effect: Without the "social guardrails" that metrics provide (even if they are toxic), people didn't become more thoughtful; they became more chaotic. Without a sense of "reputation" or "public standing," the content quickly devolved into nonsense and 4chan-style toxicity.
The Vacuum of Value: Users didn't know what was "good." In a world with no metrics, everything has the same weight. It turns out humans need some form of social proof to navigate information.
The Engagement Paradox: People complain about metrics, but they don't know how to interact without them. Content creators stopped posting because there was no feedback loop.
The project is now forgotten and dead. I realized that you can't just remove the "bad" parts of human nature by deleting a few lines of code (like 'likes' or 'shares'). You just create a vacuum that gets filled by something worse.
Has anyone else tried building "calm tech" and faced this "reputation-free" chaos?
