One of the significant problems with social media is that everything has a number against it. Followers, likes, retweets, hearts, comments and many more. Quantity is everything on social media, and yet there are so many people on social media creating content that many of us would like but we never get to see them thanks to timelines that are re-ordered for our so-called benefit.

When Manton Reece opened up Micro.blog last year to the public, I couldn’t find the number of followers that people had. Even one year on, Micro.blog still doesn’t use counts for followers and likes.

Manton explains:

It mirrors a philosophy we have with Micro.blog to launch without follower counts or public likes. Follower counts are not very useful for a new platform. They add anxiety and unavoidably lead to value judgements when considering whether to follow someone, instead of letting the quality of someone’s writing and photos speak for itself.

— Don’t worry about the numbers by Manton Reece

I love this approach. Less focus on the numbers and more emphasis on the content.

Recently, I removed all the analytics tracking from my blogs. A crazy move? Maybe, but I would like to think that my time is better served creating more content rather than worrying about how many people are reading it.

I would still like to see what people are reading and what the trending posts are on my blogs. I’m not interested in the numbers though, just what people are reading. And that’s got me wondering about an idea.

A numberless analytics dashboard.

Rather than serving up a dashboard of page views and visitors with numbers everywhere, this would serve up the titles of the posts that people are currently reading. Much in the same way that the trending widget does on Twitter. It would also show the most popular posts for the past month and year.

Terrible idea? It might be, but it's probably not the worst idea in the world and may be worth exploring.

Stay tuned for updates on this.