@seishonagon @Ron Yes, thankfully that, too, passed and here were are.

I think, as Dori mentioned in the other thread (that Ron screencapped part of above), that all too often people come in to a new community all self-important, and « likes » and « follower counts » were the way it’s done everywhere else, so anyone coming in naively is going to think that, “oh, this place is broken without those and I need to make sure the developer knows it needs to be fixed to keep my $5/mo”.

And as we’ve established over the past year or so, all of that evil gamification does a number on our brains, which takes time to undo (people who’ve stuck around usually mention after a month or so how much they don’t actually miss that stuff now that it’s out of their system), so even someone not coming in completely naively/self-important might not realize there is another way that works…

Also, Manton had made it well-known to those of us who had been here that he does listen to feedback (and is unfailingly polite in his responses even to things he doesn’t plan on doing!), and as William mentioned early on in this conversation, the steady barrage was causing many existing folks to waver. So I, for one, was truly afraid we’d end up with something that was enough like Likes to be awful if the barrage kept up (and explaining how/why we did it differently here, over and over, was exhausting in and of itself; we needed to have deployed “We Don’t Do That Here” instead!)

I imagine growth right now is much more steady and organic compared to all the ~quarterly spikes in 2018 when M.b got coverage in some publication and/or Twitter did something stupid. Anyway…