Hide Interaction Counts

In online platforms that seek to digitize or augment forms of real world human to human connection (like social networks, review sites, or dating sites), centering the numerical elements that are used to estimate quality can easily distract from the interpersonal component of the interaction.

1. Folks will often focus on how many "likes" posts get over the content of the post.
2. After referencing a rating site, people use phrases like "it has 4.8 stars" to describe reviews, rather than "people seem to really like their paella".
3. On a dating site, match percentages can skew a user's perception of a potential date, encouraging them to reconsider an "good" match, and quickly dismiss a "bad" one.

In each of these examples, the platform records a metric in order to be able to predict with better fidelity what the user will like - a metric that aligns with the aims of the user: Likes are a way to tell the algorithm to show the post to more people, ratings are a way to help sort or recommend restaurants, match percentages are calculated to help the dating site figure out who to show you next.

However, in each of these examples showing the user the numerical rating isn't required for it to be of value to them, and the display of the numerical representation has the likely effect of skewing the user's perception away from the interpersonal component of the interaction, toward some platform defined, all-flattening metric.

In many such situations, users would be better served by the platform still computing these scores, but then only displaying them in contexts where they serve some clear functional purpose, and omitting them in other contexts where their removal can increase the user's focus on their task. 

This would have the side-effect of making a wide swathe of issues we typically think of as trust and safety issues (from Addiction to Review Bombing to Discrimination to Online Shaming to...) far less acute. It is hard to find an intervention that would so radically change the dynamics and cultures of online spaces as the small little change of hiding a number.