Yeah, I hate svbtle for exactly that reason. Despite kudos being a thoroughly meaningless number, the kudos widget makes me feel like I'm nine years old and I just fell for the "a sphincter says what?" trick.

What?

...But, yeah, exactly. :)

Various searches on the subject revealed plenty of people noting how meaningless Internet points are, leading to an additional meta-rub: not only did I fall for the hover trick, I also was childish enough to google for a svbtle kudos undo. sigh

I wouldn’t say that kudos are totally meaningless, nor your quest to undo yours. By displaying kudos on their article, the author falsely purports to have more fans (implied by the name “kudos”) than they really do. By attempting to correct that number, you were fighting against (slight) false advertisement, which could cause other visitors to waste their time reading an article that you don’t actually recommend. Though bumping the number by 1 has a negligible effect, fixing all bumps that people were tricked into making would probably save many internet readers a small amount of time.

I have universally blocked Svtble kudos using the custom Adblock Plus filter `##FIGURE.kudo`. The kudos circle no longer appears on the page; I didn’t even notice that this page was supposed to have one.

I hovered over the icon because I had read Peter’s article to the end and my mouse pointer was drawn to the icon, thinking “this looks like it might do something; there’s probably a tool-tip to let me know what” so I agree that it’s a sneaky – though attractive and elegant — UI element. Anyhow, I enjoyed the article so the kudo was legitimate.

I don't fully agree with kudos (and you can have yours back!) but I have noticed that they're a very interesting metric. My own very unofficial data seems to suggest that about 1 in 10 visitors to the post will give their kudos, making it a neat measure of how many people have read to the end and "agree" with a post.