SUMMARY

The Twitter interface is filled with numbers. These numbers, or metrics, measure and present our social value and activity online, enumerating followers, likes, retweets, and more. But what are the effects of these numbers on who we follow, what we post, or how we feel when we use the site? Inviting us to consider these questions through our own experience, Twitter Demetricator is a web browser extension that hides the metrics. Follower, like, and notification counts disappear. “29.2K Tweets” under a trending hashtag becomes, simply, “Tweets”. Through changes like these, Demetricator lets us try out Twitter without the numbers, to see what happens when we can no longer judge ourselves and others in metric terms. With this artwork, I aim to disrupt our obsession with social media metrics, to reveal how they guide our behavior, and to ask who most benefits from a system that quantifies our public interactions online.

Works with https://twitter.com and https://tweetdeck.twitter.com.

100% support for many language versions of Twitter, including English, English (UK), German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Hungarian, and Sweedish; near full support for many other languages.

https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

The latest version of Twitter Demetricator is available on the Chrome web and is currently being used by 4,000 active users. The initial version was launched on 2019-07-25.

HOW TO INSTALL Twitter Demetricator FROM A CRX FILE

1. Download Twitter Demetricator CRX file
2. NOTE: Sometimes the browser may block downloading / installing CRX file from outside the Chrome Web Store. If so, you may need to download the ZIP file instead
3. In the URL bar, go to chrome://extensions
4. Enable Developer mode

Ratings

USER REVIEWS (0)