Chasing Likes: How One Button Changed The World

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

We all want to be seen, to be acknowledged, to have our ideas, our efforts, our contributions noticed and affirmed. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's deeply human. In fact, it's the social glue that binds us together in creative environments. But if we're not careful, that desire to be seen can quietly become a need to be validated. And when that shift happens, when we begin doing the work for the response rather than from our values, it changes everything. This is one of the sneakiest traps that leaders and creative pros fall into. And it rarely announces itself.

Todd Henry [00:00:38]:

You don't wake up one day and say, you know what? From now on, I shall measure my worth by the number of likes, reposts, or back slaps. I get. It just happens in the small shifts, the tiny decisions where we start prioritizing what will get a quick reaction over what is actually resonant, important, or right. Suddenly, we're not crafting work that leads. We're echoing what's already been affirmed. We're not building culture. We're feeding the algorithm. And here's the dangerous part.

Todd Henry [00:01:06]:

The more we're rewarded for that behavior, the more it reinforces itself. We get hooked. I call this externalized identity. It's when your sense of self and your direction are no longer driven by inner conviction or by your productive passion, but by outer reaction. And this can be the enemy of creative leadership, because leaders, especially leaders in a creative space, have to operate with a longer time horizon. You're not just responsible for the work, you're responsible for the systems that produce the work. You're shaping culture, you're modeling values, and you're protecting the space for others to do brave, original, and sometimes unpopular things. And that means you can't be addicted to.

Todd Henry [00:01:49]:

To applause. In fact, being a great leader sometimes means you won't be liked in the moment. You have to make a hard call. You have to give honest feedback or champion an unconventional idea. And in the short term, that might cost you a few dopamine hits. But in the long term, it's what creates momentum, trust, and transformation. Now, I say all this as someone who has to remind himself all the time of this reality. In fact, probably daily.

Todd Henry [00:02:15]:

The temptation to choose validation is strong, especially when it's designed to be entire. Platforms are built around nudging our psychology toward more frequent and more visible responses. And that's what today's conversation is all about. Martin Reeves is a brilliant business thinker and a strategist, and his new book is called the Button that Changed the World. It dives deep into the unlikely, messy invention of the the like button. And how something so small, something so seemingly innocuous, rewired how we behave, how we communicate, and even how many of us define success. What fascinated me most about the book isn't just the technical or historical side of the story. It's what it reveals about us.

Todd Henry [00:03:02]:

About how easily we can be shaped by the tools that we create and how ideas that start out as utilities can become ideologies. And about how, if we're not paying attention, we might just hand over the steering wheel of our creative lives to a piece of code. So before we get into the conversation, I want to leave you with this question. Who or what is defining success for you right now? Is it your values? Is it what you truly care about? Or is it some metric that other people are laying on top of you because one of them will always lead you somewhere meaningful and the other one will keep you chasing your tail? And if you want to do work you're proud of, you have to chase something other than being liked. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly ideas for leaders and creative pros who want to be brave, focused, and brilliant. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Martin Reeves [00:04:05]:

The thing that fascinated me initially by the like button was just how something not only so little, but so unremarkable, it's something we don't think about. It's just like air could have such a profound impact. And so you could say that the journey of the book is unpacking that unlikely conjunction.

Todd Henry [00:04:22]:

That's Martin Reeves. His fascination with the like button began in an unexpected way.

Martin Reeves [00:04:27]:

I'm a business researcher. I run the BCG Henderson Institute, which is a think tank for new ideas in business. So I research topics like strategy and innovation and write articles and books about them. And so I was getting to know somebody called Bob Goodson, who eventually became my co author. So he seemed like a very interesting guy and because he studied medieval literature and he was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and so it seemed like an interesting sort of mix. And so we had 30 minutes coffee together and to get to know each other in Mill Valley in California. And we were talking and I learned that Bob was a bit of an avid collector, maybe even a little pathological. He's collected every train ticket and sketchbook since he was a young boy.

Martin Reeves [00:05:13]:

And, and he was moving, he was moving out of the US And I. So I said to him, to make conversation, you must be finding interesting stuff in your hoarded boxes. And he said, yes. And he pulled out a sketchbook which was. And it flipped open to a page which was the dated sketch of the like button. May 2005, precisely 20 years ago. And I studied sort of inventions and things. So I immediately, the date struck me because I'd associated the like button with the rollout of the like button by Facebook in 2009.

Martin Reeves [00:05:45]:

So I said to Bob, are you telling me you invented the like button, Bob? And he gave me such a strange reply. He said, no, of course not. Maybe, I'm not sure. And I said, I can understand yes or no, Bob, but I can't understand that you don't know whether you invented the like button or not. So we spent the rest of the day. This 30 minutes turned into a 12 hour conversation and by the end of it we had an outline for a book on the whodunit story of who invented the like button, which turns out to be so fascinating, to be honest, I don't feel like the author of a book. I feel like the observer of a huge shaggy dog story that unfolded in front of us.

Todd Henry [00:06:21]:

And the story is far more complex, I think, than most people realize. It's not a simple, oh, somebody launched a like button. And it was in the world, right? There were a lot of people, I don't want to call them iterations, I think of the early attempts.

Martin Reeves [00:06:35]:

Oh, absolutely. And that sort of turned out to be the point. So the first question was that we pursued was like, who invented the like button? And that was like very complicated. Actually there are, I could give you at least 30 companies that in some way, shape or form invented an aspect of the like button. So you could say, of course, that mankind invented the like button because we've been gesturing using our thumbs and our hands for, for eons. Or you could say that it was TiVo in the, in the early 90s because they actually had a physical button. If you remember how hard it was to program your VCR, not even engineers could program their VCR. And so to simplify that, TiVo had this red and green thumbs up and thumbs down physical button that sort of learned what you liked to watch on your tv and.

Martin Reeves [00:07:19]:

But it wasn't a fully digital button. And then we had sites like, you might remember a site called hotornot where you voted on whether your friends were hot in appearance or not. And that was actually a tricky technical problem because you had to somehow implement digital voting without triggering something that your children wouldn't understand, which is a page refresh. In the days of dial up Internet, the days before broadband, if you triggered a reset, the server would send you a new URL and it could actually take 10 seconds, so you'd lose the user. Or it could be actually Bob Goodson himself with this sketch in 2005. It could be the rollout, the commercialization of the like button by Facebook. And so I guess I was brought up at school with heroic stories of people like Edison and Sir Humphry Davy, who had a very clear sighted and deliberate approach to innovation and single handedly, in an afternoon of inspiration, solved a major world problem. It wasn't like that at all.

Martin Reeves [00:08:13]:

It was messy, social, iterative and in some ways unguided. One of the really interesting things is nobody that contributed to the invention of the like button thought that they were inventing the like button in its full glory. They were just solving a very small tactical problem they were facing that particular day. So that was the first sort of story that unfolded in front of us.

Todd Henry [00:08:41]:

You know, this conversation reminds me of a book I read earlier this year that's stuck with me ever since. It's called why Greatness Cannot Be the Myth of the Objective by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman. The premise is pretty simple, but actually incredibly provocative. That having a fixed objective can actually prevent you from discovering what's truly novel or meaningful. The authors argue that many of the most remarkable discoveries in science, art and even technology didn't come from someone setting out with a clear end goal, but rather from a series of explorations, decorations, small steps, and what they call stepping stones. You don't get to greatness by aiming directly at it. You get there by following what's interesting, what feels alive, even if it doesn't make sense in the moment. And I think the like button is a perfect case study of this.

Todd Henry [00:09:28]:

No one set out to build a tool that would redefine social behavior or fuel a multi billion dollar advertising model. As Martin said, it wasn't even clear who invented it because it wasn't born of a singular visionary leap. It emerged through dozens of small decisions, tactical fixes, UX insights, bits of cultural borrowing, all layered over time. And that's a powerful reminder for any of us doing creative or strategic work. Don't be afraid to follow curiosity instead of chasing clarity. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to take the next interesting step and trust that the path will emerge as you walk it. And one of those interesting things that emerged is the use of the now ubiquitous feature thumbs up for the like symbol. Why that?

Martin Reeves [00:10:09]:

That was the second big question we looked at, which is, okay, so we discover this messy, serendipitous process of innovation. But why the thumbs up? It was in some ways a genius decision to, to go with the thumbs up because it was already well implanted in American culture. So obviously the like button is not the thumbs up. It's. It's a couple of dozen lines of JavaScript code that do something very difficult and unusual at the time, which was to create instantaneous digital feedback to the creator of the content and also the appreciator of the content, the consumer of the content, without triggering a page refresh. That was a pretty hard thing to do. You had to use JavaScript for an unintended purpose for local processing in order to be able to achieve that. So we could have gone the way of the fax machine, we could have said, we could have called this the extremely complicated programming widget.

Martin Reeves [00:11:02]:

We didn't. We called it the, the thumbs up button, the like button. And that was in a way not an accident because there was a book that was very famous, very popular amongst designers at the time called Don't Make Me Think. And it was, it inverted the idea of innovation. So normally we think about innovation in terms of things that are new, complicated, they have features. So the idea in this book that was very influential with the web designers at the time was make things look ordinary, downplay the novelty, don't even make me think, remove all friction from the process of using the invention. And how would you do that? In the case of the like button, you would piggyback on a gesture that was already deeply embedded in American culture, which is the thumbs up. And so we trace the history of the thumbs back and it's absolutely fascinating.

Martin Reeves [00:11:50]:

So you go back to the, to the World War II pilots that couldn't be heard over the noise of the airplanes, so signaled with this symbol that everything was okay, they were okay for takeoff. And popular heroes like the Fonnes that sort of progressed that. And in one of the Terminator movies, the Terminator goes down into a vat of metal with his thumb held up. And then if you pursue it, right back to its origin. Most Americans believe that the gesture came from the Roman Colosseum, which is true, but untrue. So it traces back to a painting in about, in the 1870s by a French painter called Jerome that was very popular with the rising middle class Americans who loved to consume culture and show their middle class credentials. And this was a painting, and I'm sure you'd recognize the painting if you saw it. This was a painting of the vestal Virgins in the Roman Colosseum giving a thumbs down symbol to the fallen gladiator.

Martin Reeves [00:12:47]:

Well, this was turned out to be a deliberate dramatization and distortion of what the Romans actually did. Probably the Romans actually did this. The sheathed thumb and the downward pointing thumb. But this fake, let's say this dramatic painting implanted that myth in American culture. But in language and culture, if a myth is well used, then it becomes a fact. It becomes a cultural fact. And I'll just say one more thing which is very interesting. Resonance.

Martin Reeves [00:13:13]:

And so the Gladiator one movie that sort of reinforced this notion in popular American culture came out in 2000, which is precisely when Web 2.0 was happening. And Ridley Scott, the director, had intended to turn down what he called a sandals and toga movie, but he was shown the very same painting, the one with the distorted thumbs up and thumbs down gesture. And he was so impressed by the drama of the painting that he allegedly accepted to direct Gladiator 1. We think about Silicon Valley as being dry and functional about the world of programming. But of course, everything has cultural and linguistic underpinnings. And this was the case in the case of the like button. So the like button, because of these deep cultural underpinnings, never needed any promotion. It never needed an instruction manual because it was already in the culture.

Martin Reeves [00:14:03]:

It was just transferred to the digital domain and hence was extremely popular. It spread to such an extent that now we use it tens of billions of times per day, more times per day than there are people on the planet. An incredibly universal feature.

Todd Henry [00:14:20]:

So it's almost as if culture was pre programmed to accept this new feature, the like button. But there was one incident that propelled the like button into the stratosphere and frankly, changed the way that we interact with the Internet forever. When we come back, Martin will share how the like button became an engine of engagement and commercialization and the effects that that has had on culture, business, and even our sense of creative identity and ambition. Stick around, we'll be right. So the moment when the like button, I think, went into the stratosphere was obviously when Facebook introduced the like button. And that was, there's more to it than just, let's find a way to let people show what they like.

Martin Reeves [00:15:13]:

Oh, for sure.

Todd Henry [00:15:14]:

What happens when we click the like button, I think that's something. We set off a whole chain of things. But we. I don't think we often realize what is on the other side of it.

Martin Reeves [00:15:22]:

So actually. So that was the very next question we looked at, which is not there is a class of people that are programmers that probably understand the answer to that question. I think the majority of lay folks don't understand what we click the like button. And what happens when you click is essentially there's a front end, front end algorithm which essentially takes the signal and records, okay, you clicked and shows your like to the content of the person or the person that you're liking. And that happens locally, instantaneously. That happens in the browser essentially. But then, and that was the like button at the beginning, it simply did that. And that was important because the job that my co author Bob Goodson designed the like button for was to solve the problem that Web 2.0 was happening, the social web, where the users were supposed to contribute content.

Martin Reeves [00:16:11]:

But in fact the vast majority of users were not contributing content. It wasn't working. And these young startups, after the nuclear winter of the dot bomb, the collapse of the Internet based businesses, didn't have money to pay people to write reviews like the Michelin restaurant reviews. So they just had the currency recognition. So that was initially the like button. But then it was discovered that this signal was actually revolutionary in solving for the age old joke of advertising, which was that 50% of your advertising was wasted. You would just never know which 50%. Here we had a low cost, instantaneous, highly granular feedback button on preference, I like that content or I don't like that content specific by person, specific by content specific by instant.

Martin Reeves [00:17:04]:

And then come in the backend algorithms which came later that use vast amounts of data to essentially create liking maps and following maps, essentially who's following whom, who likes what, which is of tremendous value to users because it means that I can get a content stream that is tailored to me but also useful to advertisers because they can see whether the ads are working and target their ads more precisely. And that's how social media went from being a curiosity to a business. So Facebook's innovation is Certainly not, it's 100% certain that their innovation was not the invention of the like button. It was the commercialization of a business model that leveraged the like button that we now call the advertising based business model or the attention economy model. Essentially you provide your attention, you get certain services for free. Those services are targeted because you're giving information on what you like and that is then sold. Your attention is then sold to advertisers along with the targeting information. And that became a dominant, probably the dominant business model of Silicon Valley for better for and certainly also for worse at the same time.

Todd Henry [00:18:15]:

So I would love to explore those impacts because I had a fascinating conversation with Andy Crouch about the impact of. And I had the same conversation with Kevin Kelly about the impact of AI on specifically AI, but algorithms, I think algorithms in general. And then now we're obviously we're hitting a J curve. I think with AI, like you said, it was beneficial to the user because we got to see content that was more relevant to us. But then over time, we find that we are being shaped by the algorithm as much as we are shaping the algorithm to the point where our tastes then are defined by what we're seeing, by what we've liked in the past, as opposed to us shaping the algorithm. And with AI, the conversation I've been having with several people is how will we define what taste looks like? How will we know when artificial intelligence begins to shape our understanding of taste, as opposed to us bringing our taste to the AI? So what have been the net effects of the like button on consumer behavior and also on our perception of what we like, what we don't like, the groups we belong to, et cetera?

Martin Reeves [00:19:21]:

Yeah, it's a complicated question because humans are very ingenious, but so if I build it up from traditional things and go towards more futuristic things, the first impact was simply to enrich a medium of communication. So throughout the history of communication and technology, most innovations have consisted in extending the reach of communication. So you could argue the Roman Colosseum was such an innovation because it was the largest collection of people that had assembled in one place and so large that actually you couldn't shout kill the gladiator because nobody would hear you in the cacophony. But you could visually signal thumbs up, thumbs down. So what is that? That's the extension of the reach of communication and then putting back into the language, gestural language, so that we can communicate over distances. The printing press was the same thing. So the printing press enabled the dissemination of information. And ironically, that was Bob Goodson, my co author's original discipline.

Martin Reeves [00:20:20]:

He was an expert in marginalia. Marginalia are the comments that monks made in the margin of the Great Works that they transliterated by hand. And why did they do that? They did that because the comments partly was an outlet for their own emotion of boredom. It was an incredibly painstaking task. So they amused themselves with little jokes and things, sometimes rather colorful and B ones and. Or they. Or they put interpretations into the text. Because if I'm explaining the text to you, you can ask me, what do you mean by that with a printed word? You Can't.

Martin Reeves [00:20:55]:

But the marginalia was put back. The question mark was invented in England by a monk. Why? Because the English language had become so degenerate grammatically that you couldn't tell whether something was a question or a statement without hearing the voice tone, the rising tone of the speaker. So we had to put it back in. It was a punctuational innovation. We arrived with this sort of rather incredibly incredible reach of the Internet, the ability to reach anybody instantaneously, but there's no emotion in the Internet. So we have emodges and we have the like button. So you can think.

Martin Reeves [00:21:29]:

The like button is a punctuation innovation. So that's one impact on mankind. The second impact is we can do our social thing. Our social thing. This is not imposed by Facebook. We have hardwired social behaviors. The superpower of our species is social learning, which is the ability to learn how to do something not by doing it yourself, but by only, but also by listening to the story of how somebody else did it. Social learning.

Martin Reeves [00:21:53]:

In order to socially learn, we need certain behaviors and certain linguistic conventions, and one of them is homophily. We tend to hang out with people like us because the learnings of people like us are probably going to be applicable to us. Another one is a preference for mild hierarchy. So unlike the hierarchies of the animal kingdom, people like to learn from people that other people are learning from. In other words, we like to learn from popular people. Think about the counter on the like button, and then there is gratitude. You express gratitude for the. For the learning or for the content that has been shared.

Martin Reeves [00:22:26]:

So what is. That's not stuff that's been imposed on us. That's not stuff that we're being exploited around. That is human behaviors that we have in our everyday life in our species for eons that we needed in this medium of communication if it were to take off. So it's no accident that the word like is a little ambiguous. It means I like you, I like your content, and I am like you. And I express gratitude for the opportunity to learn from you. And other people seem to be learning from you, from your, like, counter.

Martin Reeves [00:22:55]:

And so this is a very human thing. So often I'm asked, do I think this technology is good or bad? It's very hard to say because it's intrinsically. It's intrinsically human. It created a new type of business. The social media business was a. Is a multibillion dollar business that wasn't a business when just in 20 years, this is a major business. The Social media companies are actually bigger advertising companies than the advertising companies. So if I say name an advertising business, you might name a couple of big advertising agencies.

Martin Reeves [00:23:25]:

They are small relative to the social media companies. This was absolute devastation for the traditional advertising companies that needed to reconstitute themselves as digital advertising agencies. So you have all of that commerce, that value added. You had a whole set of social norms and mores which your children understand, but you and I maybe understand a bit, but they're not fully natural because we didn't grow up with them. It changed how people relate to each other and how they build relationships, how they communicate, how they show appreciation. And as always with technology that came with side effects. It came with side effects in this particular, and it's not surprising that it came with many side effects in this particular case because it intervenes, technology intervenes into things that are deeply human. So of course it's going to have very positive and very negative consequences.

Martin Reeves [00:24:16]:

So right now the list of sort of things that may be problems, I say maybe because the science, the jury on the science is still out in some cases it's a very long list. It's teenage mental health problems, it's self esteem problems in young girls, it's depression in preteens, it's cyberbullying, it's misinformation, it's the perversion of democratic elections, it's inter government propaganda. And all this happened incredibly fast. And so one of the last questions we looked at in the book was what can you do about that? And how can we be forewarned and forearmed in the case of the next rising technology, which is AI?

Todd Henry [00:24:57]:

I would be remiss if I didn't ask you what conclusions did you come to as you think about that? Because to your point, I think that we are at the cusp of another transformative.

Martin Reeves [00:25:07]:

It has very similar characteristics. So our conclusion on looking at the regulatory side of things is that what we couldn't reasonably have done for this or any other technology is forecast the DIS benefits. I spoke to all of the pioneers of the like button and not only did none of them, not a single one, have any realistic, accurate, holistic 20 year projection of where the whole thing would end up. Not a single one. Furthermore, they were not necessarily even aware of the eventual benefits of their contributions and inventions. They were just trying to solve a tactical problem of that particular day. In fact, that's why I could go further. I could say that none of them was aware of doing anything special on that day.

Martin Reeves [00:25:51]:

They had to think Back to the day, because they solve tactical problems every day. And one of the problems was, how can you vote without triggering page refresh? And how can you encourage restaurant visitors to submit a review? These were tactical problems. But eventually this turned into something really big, which is a universal digital gesture that will be the basis of the business model of social media. So we didn't figure out that benefit. Of course, the regulators couldn't realistically anticipate the downsides, and so they bumbled. The Chinese did one thing, the Americans did another thing. Scientific studies were launched, much time was spent, Congressional hearings were held, and. But I'd say the bumbling is a feature, not a bug.

Martin Reeves [00:26:36]:

We just as we tinker, by the way, our book is devoted to the tinkerers and makers that history will not record. There's tinkering and we figure out how things work in a regulatory sense by tinkering, by saying, maybe it's this. Let's launch a study on that. Let's try this. The difference in this particular case is twofold. One of them is that this is a very human technology. So the benefits and the, and the disbenefits are likely to be close to home. They're likely to impact our psyche.

Martin Reeves [00:27:04]:

And the second thing is speed, which is it took 50 years for the color TV set to reach a decent degree of penetration. It took one year for ChatGPT to go to a. To get from 0 to 100 million users. So the regulators don't have much time to act upon this.

Todd Henry [00:27:21]:

Martin Reeves new book is called Light the Button that Changed the World. It's available now wherever books are sold. If you want to hear our full conversation, you can do so@dailycreativeplus.com it's absolutely free. So what do we take away from this conversation? Well, I think the biggest lesson is this. The tools that we build shape us as much as we shape them. The like button didn't start as a grand invention. It wasn't an objective. It was a series of small solutions, small bets, small moments of curiosity.

Todd Henry [00:27:52]:

And yet it changed how we interact, the way we seek affirmation, and even how we define success. As creative pros, as leaders, we often feel the pressure to have a master plan, to know exactly where we're going and to hit the big objectives fast. But what if, like Martin and his co author Bob, discovered the most transformative ideas come not from a single stroke of genius, but from paying attention to what's already unfolding, unfolding one step at a time? Here's an action step examine one of your current projects and ask yourself, am I trying to force this towards some predefined outcome, or am I allowing it to evolve? Let curiosity drive you for a bit. It might surprise you where that curiosity takes you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Again, if you'd like to hear the full interview with Martin Reeves, you can do so for free@dailycreativeplus.com just enter your name and email and we'll send you a private podcast feed where you can hear all of our bonus content absolutely free. My name is Todd Henry. If you'd like to learn more about my speaking or my books, I've written seven of them.

Todd Henry [00:28:58]:

You can find them at toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.