This Browser Extension Allows You to Get Rid of All the Metrics on Facebook

Every now and then, our near and dear ones advise us to not be on social media all the time and spend lesser time on it. We can see a lot of articles out there that tell us how being too active on social media can prove fatal for our health. And a lot of studies find that social media adversely affects our mental and social well-being. 

But how can we really prevent ourselves from its addiction and from the security and privacy risks associated? The best option may feel like deleting the account ‘coz there seems to be no other, but the truth is that you’ll be back on it soon. 

But Benjamin Grosser has created a solution so you are not obsessed about how many likes, shares, or friends you have as you access your Facebook account. He came up with a Facebook Demetricator browser plugin that will allow you to get rid of all the numbers by hiding them while you access your Facebook account as soon as you install it on your browser. 

Here's the preview of how it would look like!

Source = Bengrosser

Grosser, the creator of the plugin explains,

No longer is the focus on how many friends you have or on how much they like your status, but on who they are and what they said. Friend counts disappear. ’16 people like this’ becomes ‘people like this’. Through changes like these, Demetricator invites Facebook’s users to try the system without the numbers, to see how their experience is changed by their absence. With this work I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality these metrics produce, enabling a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.

Facebook Demetricator was created in 2012 and has improved greatly by going through several updates since then. It also won the Terminal award back in 2012-13. 

Preview of ad with & without having installed the extension

Source = Bengrosser

This amazing plugin is free and open-source and can be installed on Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers. You can go through the FAQs to get the details about its security credentials.

The plugin does not remove even a single thing from your profile and others will be able to see the number of likes, shares and other metrics on your pics.  The numbers are removed from everywhere including news feed, pop-ups, your profile etc. There’s a toggle option to turn the plugin on or off whenever as per user’s wish. By default, the numbers are hidden keeping the toggle on.

Preview of the Facebook post having this amazing plugin.

Source = Bengrosser

Interestingly enough, Grosser wants to ask us all:

Would we add as many friends if we weren’t constantly presented with a running total and told that adding another is “+1”? Would we like as many ads if we weren’t first told how many others had liked them before us? Would we write as many status messages if Facebook didn’t reduce its responses (and their authors) to an aggregate value?

Well, we need to install Facebook Demetricator on our own browsers to answer that.