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This is a place to collect thoughts that exist somewhere between websites being intentionally addictive and this plugin completely blocking things. If you're a web designer looking to do right by this plugin, consider these ideas. If I see them in the wild I won't block them.

Replace vanity counters with their magnitude

Instead of showing 42,983 likes show 5★ likes. Don't even bother showing numbers that aren't at least 2★.

It looks dumb on its own but if you imagine a whole site using it you would see larger numbers at an exponentially rare rate. So eventually 8★ views on a YouTube video would make you turn your head as readily as one with 12,873,921 views.

Once you learn the trick it even looks neater and takes up less space. But the real value to me is that it prevents the vast majority of interactions on the internet, which happen in the 1★ to 3★ range, from triggering the vanity response that caused these numbers to get blocked by my plugin in the first place. You can't tell if having 2★ means you have 11 votes or 99 votes. If you think about it, there's a big difference in the emotional response to a post you made with 11 votes and another with 99 votes.

One final aspect of the math-stetics (Can I make up words? It's open source, yolo.) I enjoy is that it gets exponentially harder to earn the next number. If your video is at 5★ views you don't have to habitually check it and watch it climb through the tens of thousands. Someday in the distant future you might check it and have 6★ views. But every other time you look it will still be 5★ views.