Upvotes on Bear Blog

Cheers to Herman and his latest approach to upvotes on Bear Blog. I started this blog on Bear, and I still think it’s a wonderful service. I appreciate Herman’s thoughtful, principled approach to building and evolving it. I struggled with the upvotes, though. I don’t love upvoting in general and have written about that a few times. Herman’s new approach is to allow upvoting but hide the upvote numbers on Bear’s Discovery page. From his post: I made this change for two reasons. The first is that visible counts make the popular posts more popular. A post with a lot of upvotes looks like it’s worth reading, so it gets read and upvoted more, and the quiet posts with no audience stay quiet. One of the things I love about Bear, and actively curate, is that someone with no audience can still be discovered. Hiding the count means people judge a post by its title and writing, not by how many people liked it first, especially on the Newest page. The second is that upvote numbers don’t make…