Bear upvote button setting

There’s been some discussions about the Bear upvote button lately. In short, it’s about hiding the upvote button to free your mind from count concerns.

I can fully understand that, and I sometimes do it myself for shorter periods when things start to feel a bit too much.

I’m sure most Bear users know that it’s possible to disable the button by adding the make_discoverable: false attribute to any post or page. But this also means:

• It only affects that specific post or page.
• Your post or page won’t appear in discovery.

So, display: none to the rescue. Well, it’s not a perfect solution, to be honest. There are some concerns from a usability and general “web-hygiene” point of view, the main ones being:

• The button is still there, just hidden. Assistive tools and other systems may still treat it as an available interaction.
• The upvote scripts still run in the background, doing work that serves no purpose.

Not a deal-breaker, but it’s one of those technical details where “easy” and “clean” aren’t quite the same thing.

What I’m proposing is a dashboard setting for disabling the button, while still letting the post appear on the “Most recent” page. It feels reasonable to me, and I don’t believe it clashes with the spirit of Bear. It would fit nicely together with the analytics settings:

Collect analytics: [X]
Disable to not collect read analytics

Allow upvotes: [X]
Disable to remove the upvote button

Well, that’s my two cents in the discussion.

Upvote button or not, keep on blogging.

Update: A reader kindly pointed out that display: none actually removes the button from rendering and accessibility. That was news to me, and I appreciate the clarification. For those curious, the MDN docs explain this well.

Still, as the original discussion showed, it’s possible to upvote if someone really wants to. That’s why a proper setting feels like the cleaner option.