I wrote a firefox plugin that removes likes/follows/upvotes/hearts style vanity counters from a bunch of websites. It absolutely makes them better to use. This is a good change.

I had a middle-of-the-road idea in this area too, which is to replace the number with the magnitude. So you still get the feedback from the vanity metric, but it happens with logarithmic decay.

A more detailed write-up (and repo for the plugin) for those interested: https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-count...