The like / +1 is a useful signal though. What if it were visible in the UI but didn't trigger notifications or alerts?
Hmmm, you can turn off like notifications though. I did that long ago for instagram and facebook.
Same here. And follow notifications.
I think I personally like the like notifications on Twitter though to gauge what resonated with people. Though I do keep the push notifications off so it's more of just I review the notifications timeline every day or two.
Is it easy for mastodon operators to disable?
It might be possible in code to hide it on your own instance, but it'll still be there in the various Mastodon clients, other instances, etc. Without knowing the codebase (but having used the software) it looks like it'd be a major core change to turn it off completely, or change it to something like a private bookmark function.
This sums it up so perfectly. It precisely explains what I've always failed to when people ask, "why didn't you take pictures of that? or share them on Facebook?" I was just overseas for several weeks and I was able to fully absorb the entire experience because I wasn't worried about what anyone else in the world thought of what I was experiencing at the moment.
I do think there can be a middle-ground with social media if it's designed thoughtfully, with this perspective in mind. I wrote a little about it recently [0], specifically on how Mastodon shouldn't have ported over the favorite/like functionality from Twitter, because functions like that do hijack our brains to use these tools for the subconscious reward, rather than to truly improve our lives in some way.
With prevalent awareness of the issue, thoughtful design, and a change in financial incentives for platform makers I think we can come away from this crazy time of intrusive, subconscious-altering social media with just the good parts.
[0] https://write.as/matt/mastodon-social-favorites