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Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

Any explanation of why social media is toxic without mentioning the Like button is incomplete.

All of the status-seeking behaviors the researchers describe existed before Likes, but by gamifying social status Facebook threw gasoline on the narcissism fire.

And yes, Facebook didn’t invent the like button (that was Friendfeed) but they made it a standard.

Also worth noting that a key component of Facebook’s initial positioning was that it did NOT have any gamified counters, unlike MySpace and Bebo which were fueled by profile views and friend counts.

Source: was Bebo engineer/exec 2007.

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indeed , there were forums well before SNs were a thing, and while they were contentious at times, they weren't constantly at the brink of explosion/tribal wars. Makes one wonder if we even need likes/upvotes to reward opinions. It's possible that they were useful to get the social conversation going, but as the networks grew to huge scale, they ve lost most of their usefulness. I wonder how twitter would be without likes for a day

I too remember forums back in the day. Usenet via AOL was my first online social experience. I think Twitter etc would be more like that old school experience - much more of a niche product, still with the usual trolls etc but in general higher quality to noise ratio.

Likes are 100% never going anywhere. They provide a means for Google/FB/whoever to categorize you. The instant you click 'like' on a post about the latest pro-Dems thing, or on a post organizing a pro-life rally, or on something a band posted, they instantly know a lot about you. (Or more specifically, the algorithms begin acting as if they know a lot about you.) Every time you click 'like,' you are fine-tuning the company's profile of you. Maybe at one point they were about rewarding opinions or something, but in today's big-data-driven social networks, they are entirely about categorization for ads.

its the public display of likes that's driving this posturing behavior

People wouldn't "like" anywhere near as much if it wasn't public

Wasn't instagram just recently experimenting with not showing the number of likes?

Certainly possible. I do know they have done some small work to de-emphasize the numbers -- the idea being that seeing a small number next to your own post makes you sad and less likely to use the service. And I suppose I could see the possibility of a place like instagram deciding, actually, we can deduce enough based purely on who you follow, whose stuff you regularly click on.

Who knows, maybe they do actually see the possibility of culture at large making a hard turn away from SM due to its tendencies to increase depression & anxiety, increase conflict, etc., as a serious risk to their business.

But consider that in Instagram's case, it's most likely just an attempt at discrediting "influencers" - which are a big parallel marketplace of ads occurring on Facebook's property without any return for the main company.

sounds like facebook should get into the game and start selling first party fake follower counts

They don't need the like. They can just see that you stopped scrolling for long enough to engage with the ad.

> there were forums well before SNs were a thing, and while they were contentious at times, they weren't constantly at the brink of explosion/tribal wars.

The ones I was on were sure tribal and it was just a gaming forum that could get pretty ridiculous over just Xbox vs PS2 vs Gamecube. Because humans are viscously tribal.

I think the like-button is a distraction from a reality we don't want to admit.

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