How the ‘like' button was used by social media companies to turbocharge their business models

Irish Times

2 days ago

The 'like' button and its palette of variations is used about 160 million times a day globally and it is now the most widely used symbol of affirmation in the digital world.
The story of how and why it quickly established this status in the noughties, how social platforms have exploited it to turbo boost their business models since and its future in the world of
artificial intelligence
is the subject of a fascinating new book, Like: The Button that Changed the World
.
Bob Goodson, co-author of the book with Martin Reeves, played an important role in the button's development. While he says that, as with most innovative breakthroughs, no one person can claim to have developed the like button single-handedly, he was one half of a two-person team at the then start-up online directory Yelp that developed the first button that allowed users to stay on the same page after clicking.
Yelp, which is now a $1 billion business, was also the first to put multiple emotional buttons on a web page. Then as now, the big issue was engagement.
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'In the early years of the web, about 5 per cent of people created content and 95 per cent simply consumed it and that was a real problem for platforms who wanted to grow,' he tells The Irish Times.
'Putting content on the web in its early days was a really geeky thing to do. They were technical issues, there was dial up, joining forums, it was very male-dominated and women didn't feel safe on the internet. This was before the nice graphical interfaces were introduced and it was all text-based. Yelp and others were thinking about ways of bringing the barrier down and introducing 'likes' proved a real winner.'
Today, Goodson runs a Silicon Valley-based firm, Quid, whose AI models are used by many of the top Fortune 50 companies, while Reeves is chairman of Boston Consulting Group's business strategy think-tank BCG Henderson Institute.
Their book explores the psychology of likes and finds evolutionary motives. Likes boost survival chances by contributing to the friendship, communication and hierarchy that maximises social learning. We have evolved to get a buzz from liking and that applies to both giving and receiving. A positive reaction to a social-media post causes a frisson of excitement and a feel-good surge and this is the psychological territory that the like button taps into.
Interestingly, it doesn't work in reverse. Pioneers who tried 'don't like' buttons soon dropped them as they found users hated them.
The thumb symbol is another enduring feature of the like button and many of the variations also incorporate elements of the hand.
'We think there's something very powerful about the hand. Monks in the 14th century used to draw hands with pointing fingers in the margins of manuscripts, called manicules. People have been interested in interacting with text like this for as long as it has been written down,' Goodson notes.
Liking is a form of content creation. When you click a like you are putting your mark down forever. If you are not careful, it could cost you your job
—
Bob Goodson
Facebook
's adoption of the like button was the key development for the 'like economy' and provided a huge boost to its fortunes from 2009 onwards.
Others quickly followed. As analytics became more and more powerful, like data has become a digital gold mine, allowing platforms to customise content to users and sell that user data to those wanting to reach them. The like
button greases the wheels of this model and the algorithms here are the secret sauce, guarded carefully.
As the authors put it: 'Your use of a platform can reveal behaviour you don't even reflect on or recognise about yourself. The timing of your activity on the site, for example, can say a lot about the typical rhythm of your day, and the emotional valence of your postings can serve as a kind of mood ring you didn't know you were wearing. Like poker players highly adept at spotting tells, the social-media platforms you use pick up on signals you're not conscious of transmitting.'
Secrecy is a recurring theme. 'It's a neat trick on the part of the platforms, giving their product away for free to users without being too explicit about the fact that, in fact, those users are the product.'
Not that consumers seem to be too bothered. Arguably having goods and services pitched at you isn't a problem if the algorithm is serving up things that you've told it you are actually interested in – whether you've done that consciously or unconsciously.
More worryingly is the effect of likes and/or the lack of them, on the more vulnerable. Children are a particular area of concern in regard to issues such as self-esteem, Goodson acknowledges.
'Social media is a powerfully addictive thing because of the game the platforms are playing for attention, and they will use whatever works. It has created an experience that requires a lot of self-discipline and awareness to keep it healthy. There's a growing belief that children are not ready for it. We're now seeing regulation in this area, such as in Australia, which is prohibiting under-16s from using platforms. My expectation is that trend will continue and that there will need to be stronger protections and regulations for younger people.'
Likes are not a trivial matter for those of any age, however, as many public figures have found to their extreme cost. 'Liking is a form of content creation. When you click a like you are putting your mark down forever. If you are not careful, it could cost you your job.'
Likes are also playing an important role in the ongoing development of AI, albeit in a different way.
'There are like buttons in the chat apps. They use thumbs up and thumbs down because it won't offend the model. They want you to interact with it because it will improve performance of the large language model. It's just as important. We also think the like data that the platforms hold are very important data sets to train the models. It could be a real competitive advantage for
Meta
and
X
.'
Reeves and Goodson have produced a thoughtful, well researched and easily accessible book on this subject, exploring the deep significance of what appears to be simple and intuitive feature that we take for granted, but one that in fact has a profound influence on our lives. It gets a thumbs up.
Like: The Button That Changed the World, by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson, is published by Harvard Business Review Press