A user, cornchip, proposed a feature to allow users to hide like counts, while still seeing the heart icon and whether they’ve liked a post. This feature would be based on user preference and site-wide, aiming to reduce stress and increase engagement. pfaffman suggested using CSS to hide like counts, while itsbhanusharma noted that it would be more complex to achieve on a per-topic or per-category basis.
cornchip emphasized that this isn’t a personal request, but rather a feature that would benefit the community. pfaffman provided a potential solution, suggesting a theme component that could be applied site-wide or to specific categories, allowing users to choose whether to display likes. However, a plugin would be required to enable users to set a custom field to turn like counts on and off.
codinghorror pointed out an existing topic on disabling likes, which may provide a solution to the proposed feature.
Hi, is there a way users can hide like counts? They would still see the heart icon and whether they had clicked it, just not how many others users had also done so.
Here’s how I’d like users to have like counts not appear, should they choose to. I wasn’t allowed to upload two images but I’ve removed the 1 next to each of those hearts:
In case this sounds like a strange request, two exemplary communities hid this information several years ago. MetaFilter allows users to hide favorite counts and still favorite posts; many users report feeling calmer and more engaged with each post without being able to see these numbers. Hacker News does not allow on a per-user basis, but many users feel calmer when they can’t see the number of upvotes.
I was thinking based on user preference and site-wide. I can see how CSS would be involved in executing the preference. If there’s a plugin route I should be taking, happy to look into it.
This isn’t just a personal request or else I would just use custom CSS from a browser plugin.
If you’re the admin, you can create a theme component to hide it site wide with CSS (you could also apply it to a set of categories with a bit more work). You could allow users to choose their theme which would give them the ability to choose whether they want likes. Perhaps your can do it yourself if you see Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes.
A plugin would let you have a single theme and allow users to set a custom field that would turn it on and off. It would be about twice the work and make your site somewhat more difficult to maintain.
