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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you deleted your other comment just now, but I agree with it. When I get just one like, I'm thinking to myself how awesome I must be because I touched another person's experience this moment with some photo or comment I made to the world electronically. If I got 15 likes, I'd be wondering if I'm some kind of gifted social icon without knowing it!

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Likes are extremely cheap in the world of young people, so I can see how "only" 15 likes is a signal that the post wasn't greatly received. I watched my nephew (12 year old) use Instagram over the holidays and it was interesting to see how he used the app. He rapidly scrolled through his feed, barely giving each post enough time to register what it was, and he double-tapped (liked) around 80-90% of all posts as they went by.

If people are liking 90% of the posts on their feed, the "like" doesn't become that useful of a signal to determine what people truly like. It is being used for something else at this point. Some way of extending and re-inforcing a persons graph of friends? I'm not entirely sure.

Wow that's crazy. I'm sure that usage is not the expectation from the app makers. It almost makes me wonder if there is a strange counter-psychology going on there, as if your acceptance was in part measured by your participation, and that if someone did not see a like from you, it had consequences.

> that if someone did not see a like from you, it had consequences.

I'm 28 and people definitely notice when you don't notice one of their posts. A like is often just an aknowledgement of "Yes, I saw this, I still follow what you're up to, we're still friends"

You could think of it as a development to handle the absence of "dislike". Those 10% of posts which do not receive a "like" can be assumed to be "dislike".

Sure. And when I was a kid, $2 was a lot of money.

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