Status

Accepted (2026-04-26). The MVP headline. Sentence-describable to a friend.

Context

“What makes Nah? amazing and fresh in the first 30 seconds, in one sentence?” The candidates were haptics-as-ritual, voice-first, daily windows, home-screen widgets, slow-loading-by-design, and no-counts. Of those, no-counts was the only one that’s structural (not gimmicky), visible (you notice the absence immediately), philosophical (it’s the thing Instagram needs to live), and free to implement (it’s mostly not shipping features).

Decision

No visible counts of anything, anywhere. No like count. No view count. No follower count. No reaction count. No read count. No daily-active-friend count. No streak count. The numbers don’t exist in the UI.

Where we genuinely need to communicate “someone did this,” we use names and faces: Maya reacted, not 3 people reacted. Wife and 2 close friends have read this never; either Wife has read this or nothing.

The soft 150 cap (ADR-0003) follows the same rule: communicated as language (“your circle is full”), never as a meter.

Considered alternatives

• Selective counts (likes off, but show “read by N friends”). Rejected. Once any number exists, attention starts to optimize for it. Read counts become a performance metric just as cleanly as like counts. The discipline is the rule’s totality.
• Counts visible only to the poster, not viewers. Rejected. Even private counts shape posting behavior. Casey checks his own posts to see “did anyone see this?” — and that’s the same gravitational pull as public counts.
• Counts hidden by default, opt-in to see. Rejected. Opt-in is the wrong default direction. The architecture should make the right thing easy and the wrong thing intentional, not the inverse. Also: opt-in counts that “the design-conscious users disable” become a signal of in-group savvy, which is its own kind of performance.
• Status quo: ship some counts because they’re standard. Rejected. The headline disappears.

Consequences

Positive:

• The sentence-describable difference from Instagram lands instantly. Friends describe Nah? to other friends in one sentence: “no counts of anything, anywhere.”
• Architecturally simpler: we don’t ship a counters service. We don’t think about caching counts, eventual consistency on counts, or migration paths when counts get bigger than 32-bit ints.
• Removes an entire class of design temptations downstream. Engagement-optimization decisions become much harder to even propose when there’s nothing to optimize for.

Negative / acknowledged cost:

• “No counts” is a negative feature. The first 30 seconds of an app where things are absent doesn’t feel amazing on its own — it feels empty. ADR-0005 (ritual onboarding) and the seeded-posts mechanic exist to fill the space the absence creates.
• We probably will track engagement signals server-side (for the daily digest, for soft-cap warnings, for debugging). Discipline: they exist for the system, never for the user.
• Some standard features (sorting feeds by popularity, “trending,” recommendations) become structurally impossible. That’s intended, but it removes options if the product needs to flex later.

What would prove this wrong

• We ship MVP and the absence of counts is invisible — friends don’t notice or describe it as the thing that’s different. That means the headline doesn’t actually do work and we picked the wrong sentence.
• A friend bounces because they “need to know who actually saw this” for a moment that mattered to them, and the absence of a read indicator feels like the app withholding information.
• The seeded-posts and ritual-onboarding mechanics (the positive features the absence is meant to make space for) don’t carry the wow on their own, and the experience flattens.