I Killed the Like Button
A blog post about reclaiming the web from Facebook and Twitter lived in my head for years. The guy who wrote it was arguing that we’d basically handed our conversations over to a handful of corporations, that everything we said disappeared into an endless feed, that we’d lost any real power over our own expression. It was obviously true and I could feel it happening to me in real time, which made it worse.
The like button became the perfect symbol of everything wrong with that. It started as something harmless—a quick way to acknowledge something without typing a comment. But somewhere it turned into a god, a little number that kept running score on your relevance, your worth, how much your thoughts mattered in a world where everyone’s screaming for attention. And once you start watching that number, it gets in your brain and doesn’t leave.
You don’t see it coming. You post something and you start refreshing the page, waiting for the counter to move. Then you notice which posts do well and which don’t, and your brain does the math automatically. The weird observation, the thing that only makes sense to you—that gets deleted before you publish it. You post the safe thing instead. The video everyone’s already seen. The joke that lands. Because you’ve trained yourself to predict what the algorithm wants and you write toward that.
Then the addiction takes hold. You get ten likes and you want twenty. You get a hundred and you want more. I’d find myself refreshing obsessively, chasing that next hit, and when it stopped climbing I’d spiral, wondering what was wrong with the post, what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t good enough. It doesn’t matter if the final count is thirty or three thousand. You’re still hungry for one more.
The real problem is that a like isn’t actually approval. It’s barely even engagement. Someone clicks a button without reading, or they skim and agree with a headline. That pixel becomes a data point I’m using to measure my own worth as a writer and as a person, which is absolutely insane when I think about it. I had normalized being a lab rat in some tech company’s experiment, pressing a lever for dopamine hits.
So I killed it. The like button is gone. The Twitter share count too. Yeah, it’s probably going to hurt my traffic because I understand exactly how this works—people click on things more when they see validation. But the second you start optimizing for that is the second you stop writing for yourself. You start performing. You become someone else.
Instead I put in a simple share button with no counter. If someone wants to pass something along, they can, but not because a big number told them it was good. Because it actually mattered to them. That’s a real choice, not a reflex.
It’s not perfect. It’s not going to fix the internet or overthrow anyone’s business model. But it’s where I can start, with this one small corner. Not watching the counter. Not letting the fear of a bad number keep me from writing something weird or unpopular or true. Writing like I did before this all got turned into a game.