If you can ‘like’ everything, do you value anything?

By Justin Fox

In the early 2000s, software developers at several different internet startups more or less independently came up with ways for users to express approval (and in some cases disapproval) with minimal effort and — a big deal in those days of slow internet connections — without having to reload the page.

At news aggregator Digg.com, every “digg” or “bury” helped determine which articles would be featured and which would not. Online community Everything2.com similarly used upvotes and downvotes, as well as a “cool” button labeled “C!” Blog platform Xanga had an “eProps” button that allowed readers who didn’t want to leave a comment to at least acknowledge that they appreciated a post. Review site Yelp Inc. aimed to reward users for reviewing restaurants and other businesses by having readers label the reviews “useful,” “funny” or “cool.” Video purveyor Vimeo Inc. set out to emulate Digg, but as a company executive later told Fortune, “we didn’t want to call it ‘Diggs,’ so we came up with ‘Likes.’”

The Vimeo “Like” button was introduced in November 2005. Facebook, after a year and a half of pushback from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, debuted its thumbs-up “like” symbol in February 2009, catapulting the concept from social media experiment to mainstream ubiquity. Since then, according to estimates from the BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s in-house think tank, people worldwide have clicked or pressed “like” in some form more than 300 trillion times.

This chart and the story told above are borrowed from Like: The Button That Changed the World, a new book from BCG Henderson Institute Chairman Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson, currently the CEO of artificial intelligence company Quid Inc. and, in September 2004, employee No. 1 at Yelp. While packing for a move, Goodson stumbled across a sketch he had made in May 2005 of thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols for use with Yelp reviews — not the approach the company chose, but a sign of what was to come. He showed it to his friend Reeves, and this book is the result.

My initial impression upon seeing the title was that it was about just the Facebook thumbs-up, and I wondered whether that justified an entire book. In fact, Reeves and Goodson’s account encompasses hearts, checkmarks and every other single-touch method of signaling approval or at least acknowledgment online and manages to combine journalistic details and consulting-firm frameworks in charmingly enlightening fashion. Along the way it raises many questions about what the like button has meant for the world, some of which it answers.

Much of the power of digital liking, Reeves explained when I talked to him about the book, lies in how it blends two key drivers of human social behavior, signaling simultaneously that:

• I like you.

• I’m like you.

This combination helped supercharge the rise of advertising on social media, as likes enabled advertisers both to get instant feedback and to segment audiences in ways that hadn’t been possible before. It also helped fry lots of social media users’ brains by subjecting them to endlessly recurring popularity contests that often rewarded the most extreme and outrageous online behavior. I use the qualifier “helped” because it’s clearly not just the “like” button that did these things. Also crucial were the ability to share social media posts or videos and to see how often they’d been shared or viewed. Advertisers now often favor measures of online engagement and behavior that are more nuanced and harder to fake than likes. But it all started with liking.

As I contemplate my own use of thumbs-ups and hearts and other such low-effort interactions, I worry that their very ease of use is chipping away at the ties that bind me with others. Again, this is a broader phenomenon than just the like button. Facebook and LinkedIn have made it easier than ever to stay in touch with old friends and colleagues, but their rise has coincided with a sharp decline in how many close friends Americans say they have. For more than a decade now I have been at least vaguely aware of what almost everyone I’ve ever known is up to, and have signaled my approval of countless meals, children’s accomplishments and dog photos. But all this seems to have translated into less real-world contact, not more.

There’s a small but growing behavioral-science literature emphasizing the value of effort, which had previously been seen only as a cost to be avoided. “While it is clear that people will work hard to obtain something of value, what has been largely overlooked is the notion that working hard can also make those same things more valuable,” psychologists Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav and Christopher Y. Olivola wrote in a 2018 summary of recent research in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. “Effort can even be experienced as valuable or rewarding in its own right.”

The ability to click on a thumbs-up or some other symbol of acknowledgment or approval is of a piece with many other recent innovations that remove friction and effort from interactions online and transactions online and off. I’m not going to deny that most of these innovations are useful. But without actual friction, the physical world would be pretty much impossible to navigate, and I suspect that may be the case with metaphorical friction as well.