Day 73: Maintaining Hide Likes

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Before Hide Feed and Intention, I built an extension called Hide Likes that hides likes, followers, and other vanity metrics across the Web. (Aren’t I so creative in my naming?)

It was fun to build, and I immediately found it worthwhile for my personal use. Today, I credit Hide Likes for my lack of concern for things like how many likes my posts get, how many followers I have, and other things along those lines that reify my sense of self and makes me compare myself to others. I feel much more at ease sharing myself as I am without worrying about what others will think of me. “Out of sight, out of mind” works!

I recently had someone send feedback that Hide Likes stopped working on Facebook:

I eventually got around to fixing this issue, but it took a while because Hide Likes is not a priority for me right now. Because the extension is completely free, it feels less compelling to work on than Hide Feed and Intention, which I see as ways to help me toward my goal of making a living building things I love.

I see two options:

  1. Keep Hide Likes free and work on it in my free time as a lower-priority item
  2. Create a Pro plan for Hide Likes so that I’ll be more motivated to fix issues and improve it

At this point, I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea of charging for the things that I make. The cost of maintaining software is nontrivial, especially for things like Hide Likes and Hide Feed where the extension needs to be updated every time any of the supported sites make a change.

One model that my friend Shiva suggested for my monetization strategy is to tie the monthly subscription to all of my work rather than to individual apps. For example, instead of subscribing just to Hide Feed Pro, a subscription would grant someone access to the Pro plan of all the apps I create: Hide Likes, Hide Feed, Intention, and whatever else I make. It’d be like Patreon where people support the creator directly rather than any particular product.

That model would definitely make it more compelling to maintain Hide Likes and other things I make. It’d also provide an incentive to publish things that I simply haven’t bothered with because I didn’t want to deal with the additional maintenance: For example, I’ve developed an extension called Hide Notifications (can you guess what it does?), but I haven’t bothered publishing it because it seems like too much extra work. At the same time, that means that I’d have to consistently and promptly maintain everything, which feels like quite a lot.

I kind of want to roll all of these into one extension because having an extension for hiding likes, another for hiding notifications, and yet another one for hiding feeds feels quite redundant. We’re back to the mega hider extension idea that I was considering two weeks ago.

Man, I wish I could clone myself so I could work on Intention and all these other projects at the same time. Or maybe I should consider hiring someone / making a team? Hm.