Social media is a death carousel, and by the start of the new year, I wanted off. National policy and news stories continued to be steered by the tweets and retweets of @realDonaldTrump. A photo of an egg had surpassed 30 million likes on Instagram. Children were eating laundry detergent and setting themselves on fire in exchange for followers. The phrase “late-stage capitalism” was appearing everywhere.

So I purged. Not the social media accounts, but the numerical machinery powering them. Likes. Retweets. Views. Followers. Subscribers. The metrics by which the words, photos, videos—what’s known, in toto, as content—are made valuable. I installed a series of browser extensions that promised to leave the content intact but expunge those boldface, sexy, ubiquitous numbers that cluttered and dominated my feeds.

My guide to denumeration was Benjamin Grosser, an artist and assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign. Grosser builds little UX hacks for liberating Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram from the hegemony of hearts, notifications, and follows. Install one of his extensions, log on, and you’ll find the room looks the same—but the curtains and crown molding have disappeared.

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Grosser made his first “demetricator” in 2012, hypothesizing that a subtle tweak to Facebook’s design could profoundly change a user’s experience on the platform. The seesaw of content and applause has less to do with what we actually want to post, he reasoned, and more to do with our insatiable appetite for validation. “We’ve become reliant on numbers, so we let them stand in for meaning more than they do,” Grosser says. Remove the integers and we might find our digital Shangri-la. Or at least a slightly healthier, more sustainable life online.

I needed this. When I’d open Twitter, it wasn’t to skim the news but to check how many retweets my delicious thought-crumbs had accumulated overnight. I felt anxious when a (laboriously edited) pic on Insta­gram underperformed. Demetrication promised a new path. I would become an unquantified self, an Instagrammer-­Facebooker-tweeter beyond measure. I installed demetricators for the Big Three and waited.

It took a second. The rivers of tweets and ’grams still flowed, dragging along the usual cyberpollution. I composed a tweet with a link to a story I’d written, then refreshed the page and waited for my digital pat on the back. It never arrived. Where once I hovered my cursor, waiting for the dopamine hits, there was only blankness. (You can still see if you have a notification, just not how many.) The number of retweets—gone. Comments—AWOL. How long had my tweet been out in the wild, possibly languishing without recognition? I couldn’t tell; the time stamp, too, had vanished.

Not that I immediately stopped searching for approval. When someone new followed me on Twitter, I’d make my way to their follower count … only to find nothing. I’d dreamily wonder how many people liked my latest Instagram post or whether I was the first or 500th to retweet a joke. With the demetricators engaged, I found my cursor circling vacant space, waiting to be told how to think. The emptiness made apparent how much I’d depended on those numbers.

Grosser says that this—the heightened awareness of how quickly we gravitate toward the metrics—is the most pronounced effect of his number-scrubbers. “We create rules for ourselves about how to act within the system based on what the numbers say, but we don’t realize we’re doing this,” he says. Online etiquette is dictated by digits. An underperforming post gets self-consciously deleted. We rarely comment on something that’s more than two days old, lest we appear stalkerish. Our own posts are so shaped by a hunger for numbers that over time we create only what the machine tells us to: the inflammatory, the incendiary, the infantile.