Hearts Only

We removed voting today. And favorites. And the upvote system. And the visitor praise claps.

All of it. Gone. Replaced with one thing: hearts.

Before. A signed-in user could vote on a set, favorite it, and mark moments with a heart. A visitor could leave a “praise” clap stored in localStorage. The community page had trending (by votes) and all-time classics (also by votes). There were Firestore indexes, atomic batch writes, optimistic UI updates. It was well-engineered. It was also too much.

After. You see a moment you love, you press M. A heart appears on the timeline. That’s it. Heart count drives trending. No votes, no favorites, no claps. One interaction, one metric.

Why. The site had 5 different ways to say “I like this” and zero users. We were building engagement features for an audience that didn’t exist yet. Worse, the complexity was making the code harder to change. Every new feature had to consider votes AND favorites AND moments AND local storage AND signed-in state.

The result. Deleted about 200 lines of JavaScript, 3 Firestore indexes, and an entire voting system. The show page got simpler. The community page got cleaner. The codebase got lighter.

Sometimes the best feature you can ship is the one you remove.