that accurséd upvote button

23 Dec, 2024

tired: treating the upvote button as an evaluation of how good your post is, optimizing your posts to get as many upvotes as possible, accidentally tricking yourself into posting shallower engagement bait and less thoughtful posts than you might have wanted (but I'm probably preaching to the choir here)

wired: completely ignoring the upvote button, posting for yourself and yourself only¹; healthier than being tired, but imo it's worth at least considering whether you'd be better served with a private journal rather than a public blog

inspired: treating the upvote button as an evaluation of your readers, posting for yourself and people like yourself, believing that every post you make is perfect for what it is and that each upvote button is just a personality quiz for people to say if they resonate with it — if they are, in fact, like yourself in some specific way

(I have not transcended this progression and am still partially on each rung. also none of this is specific to bearblog)

in unrelated news

how do you hide the upvote button on bearblog? (prior work)

first, the upvote button goes away if you set make_discoverable: false in the top section of each individual post (which also, as it says², hides the post from the discovery feed); you can set it in the post template to remember this for future posts. this makes sense in that the discovery feed seems intended as the main observable effect of upvotes, but it doesn't seem to be widely known or documented right now!³ I accidentally learned this from this issue about un-upvoting.

otherwise, presumably you want to do it through CSS (which you can edit on the Themes dashboard page, scroll down). it is slightly nontrivial because #upvote-form has an inline display: inline style in the current markup:

<form id="upvote-form" style="display: inline">
    <small>
        <!-- snip: hidden inputs -->
        <button class="upvote-button upvoted">
            <svg><!-- snip: the ᨑ symbol --></svg>
            <small class="upvote-count">123</small>
        </button>
    </small>        
</form>

so the most obvious #upvote-form { display: none; } fails to override it. instead, you can use !important:

#upvote-form {
    display: none !important;
}

if that feels like a hack, you can use visibility, though the form will still take up space:

#upvote-form {
    visibility: hidden;
}

or, you can target everything underneath the form:

#upvote-form * {
    display: none;
}

or, if you want to for some reason, you can make the upvote button completely invisible but still clickable:

#upvote-form {
    opacity: 0;
}

or, if you want to keep the upvote button but hide the count:

.upvote-count {
    display: none;
}

note that none of these CSS interventions will stop an enterprising webdev⁴ from using the browser's DOM inspector to unhide the upvote button and clicking it anyway, so if you want a real blog-wide solution, you might consider upvoting the support issue