The future of the “like” button: Thumbs up or thumbs down?
- Many people had a hand in inventing the “like” button, and it now serves a variety of functions.
- The button has become “a kind of Swiss Army knife for holding up one’s end of a digital conversation.”
- Will the button continue to evolve and spread in an age when greater regulatory intervention is likely?
Gary Shteyngart was pausing, rubbing his chin been asked but hardly pondering it for the first time. Our question to him: What is the future of the like button? The last time he gave the same topic a lot of thought was in 2007–2008, when he was in the thick of writing a novel called Super Sad True Love Story. It’s an absurdly creative tale of a mismatched pair of lovers in a dystopian near future highly influenced by the rankings on a powerful social media site called GlobalTeens. Under the spell of this platform and using the “äppärät” devices they clutch in their hands, everyone in the novel constantly enters numbers between 1 and 800 to indicate how much they like everyone and everything else around them. And thus, they all behave in ways calculated not necessarily to enhance their actual happiness but always to increase their scores.
Recheck that date now. Super Sad True Love Story was written in 2007–2008. This was before Facebook had added its like button and made one-click peer feedback part of the fabric of so many people’s lives.
Like other masters of his craft, Shteyngart imagines the fictional future through a simple process of looking at where we are today and what got us here, tracing existing trends that will continue to play out. And with regard to the like button, the story has continued in a way that has him concerned. He knows that people value this handy substitute “for some kind of feeling of being acknowledged” but worries about their gravitating to digital tools for it “because that’s what we used to get from friendships.” He told us he dreads a future spent more in digital interaction, first, because he so relishes the real world: “I love a good steak and a martini and the other pleasures of the physical very much — and the virtual never comes to the same level. It’s a pathetic imitation of real life.” But even more, he is dismayed that the virtual now comes close enough to real life for many social media users that it is harder and harder to get them to expend the marginally greater effort of interacting with people offline.
“They spend all their time on this thing because it’s been positioned as a kind of alternative. And for many people, what it does is it slowly destroys their ability to have real lives, and that makes them seek the substitute.” The result is a downward spiral into that pathetic imitation of life he deplores. And, he said, “the more atomized society gets, the more these things have a larger purchase on people’s time.”
Talking to a writer highly accomplished in painting near-future scenarios was something we knew we should do as we took up the last question of our journey into the belly of the like button. Shteyngart himself would endorse the practice. He tips his hat to William Gibson, for example, and specifically his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which “proved to be incredibly predictive of what life would be like when we committed ourselves to the virtual world.” At the same time, Shteyngart admitted that the future will probably not be so much of a “hellhole” as he portrayed it in Super Sad. It is, he said, just part of his job as a fiction writer to focus on the most interesting ways things could go horribly wrong.
So, will the like button live on and continue to evolve and spread? Without too much thought, we could see a couple of reasons why it might not. For one reason, the next new habit-transforming thing might come along to make likes obsolete. And another: the actions of regulatory agencies and policy makers might cause platforms to hobble this feature. On the other hand, legal and regulatory interventions could instead bring back new strength to the like button if its use makes people hesitate to use other social media features.
In 2024, people in the United Kingdom were put on notice that they could be arrested under British law for sharing objectionable content on social media. According to Stephen Parkinson, the nation’s director of public prosecutions, an account holder on a social media platform can violate speech restrictions as publisher or as a “republisher,” and if the content passed along is later deemed defamatory or having the potential to incite racial hatred, the republisher can be held liable in the same way as the original poster. “If you retweet that, then you’re republishing that, and potentially committing that offense,” Parkinson said. “We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material and then follow up with arrests.” For our purposes, it’s just an example to illustrate that the like button does not exist in a vacuum. If more active law enforcement along these lines means that people need to pause a moment and ponder the possible consequences of sharing, the added friction in the process might cause many to default to the simpler like button to register reactions. And liking data could gain new respect as a factor to weight more heavily in algorithms.
Talking to a writer highly accomplished in painting near-future scenarios was something we knew we should do as we took up the last question of our journey into the belly of the like button.
As we asked more people about the future of the button, we also heard about more complications and possibilities — especially since the feature performs such a range of functions. As we’ve seen, many people had a hand in inventing the like button, and what they variously designed it to do is at best a small part of all it eventually did. People today have a wide variety of motives for offering one- click emotional reactions and many ways to do it. The original button may have been designed to facilitate compliments that would motivate people to generate more online content and then was intentionally tweaked to recognize social media users’ desire to register varied emotional responses to content that caught their attention. But people’s liking behavior also reflects their desires to assert identity, solidify in-group status, regulate conversation, show interest in others they would like to know better, maintain social ties, amplify favored opinions, and much more.
So, were we asking more about the future of a one-click feature in an online user interface? Or were we talking more broadly about future solutions to the social and commercial needs those clicks serve, and how people’s emotional reactions might be efficiently registered in the future? Will platforms continue to offer the like button as an all-purpose tool, a kind of Swiss Army knife for holding up one’s end of a digital conversation, or will each of the button’s functions take its own different future path?
Either way, whatever comes next is likely to insinuate itself gradually instead of replacing the current feature in one fell swoop.
