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In the early 2000s, a start-up called Yelp came up with a novel and friendly feature for the emergent world wide web. Ordinary users could post reviews of restaurants that everyone could read. But there was a problem: very few people were interested in writing things on the internet. Yelp’s engineers needed to give them a reason to.
The story of how they incentivised this user-generated content is the jumping off point for Like, an upbeat take on internet history by two veterans of business and technology. Yelp reckoned people might be compelled to post reviews if they received compliments from others. Ultimately, alongside similar experiments at other tech start-ups, this led to the ubiquitous expression of instantaneous recognition that is the like button, which, Bob Goodson and Martin Reeves write, is now clicked some 160bn times a day.
Like so many features of online life, what is taken for granted was until recently far from self-evident. It had to be imagined. The authors note that in the internet’s early days it was assumed that “just 1 per cent of people would write and create content that people actually would read”. The successes of the like button and Yelp “exploded that percentage”, creating an online world in which everyone was a content creator.
Goodson writes from experience: in his twenties, after training as a medievalist, he played an instrumental role in the development of like, sketching its “thumbs-up” iconography, thinking through the concept and discussing the code that made it possible to log a reaction without leaving a page.
His on-the-ground perspective is perhaps the most valuable thing about the book. It takes us back to a time when the web was a sandbox full of smart, excited people inventing the future. We see how current ways of relating to each other — from expressing frictionless praise to instant messaging or posting stuff online — were the result of often quirky design choices made a couple of decades ago.
If a behind-the-scenes account is the book’s strong point, it also makes it somewhat light on really probing criticism about the broader impacts of like. This is not totally absent. One chapter briefly explores issues such as smartphone addiction and mental health problems among children, dependence on regular virtual micro-validation, or the industry that aggregates vast amounts of personal data from users, without compensation, then uses it to sell them tailored ads.
But the authors quickly jump to the defence of the “friendly little like button” and seem incurious about its more profound consequences. Discussing the UK Information Commissioners’ 2019 targeting of like as a “reward loop” technique that encourages users to engage with a service that collects their data, they appear shocked. “How could this be?” they cry. “A single technical feature among many, rooted in human sociality and embraced by millions. Why would anyone want to crack down on it?”
The problem, the authors say, is “multiple unintended consequences”. The like button was invented for “narrow purposes” — such as encouraging user-created content — but was applied to “wholly different ones” and embedded into new business models.
This seems naive. Boosting user-generated content is hardly a narrow purpose, and creating a reward loop to incentivise users to post more seems a fair description of what the designers of the like button were doing. In the authors’ own telling the business models that now govern who profits from and controls data emerged in part from the button itself; the unexpected ways it influenced the internet were in keeping with like’s core functionality and purpose — a feature not a bug.
The book closes with speculation about the future: could the button end up in eternal conversation with AI? Might we register a like using only a thought? Either way, Reeves and Goodson seem unbothered. “History is full of predictions of dystopian futures that never materialized,” they say.
Yet, as we watch the unfolding of new kinds of technology in what feels like a darker chapter of internet history, Like’s breezy tone seems discordant. It could also be instructive. I was left wondering to what extent the optimistic “it’ll work out all right in the end” approach to like reflected the attitude of contemporary technologists. I didn’t find the thought reassuring.
Like: The Button That Changed the World by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson Harvard Business Review £25, 288 pages
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