San Francisco – The Internet would not be the same without the similar button, the icon of the thumbs as Facebook and other online services became a digital cat grass.
We like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook planted the symbol on a giant sign that was outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company was renamed as a goal platforms in 2021.
A new book, “Like: the button that changed the world”, Deepen the complicated story behind a symbol that has become the manna and ruin of a digitally driven society.
It’s a talent that trace back to gladiator battle for survival during the Roman Empire Before Fast-Forwarding To The Early 21st Century When Technology Trailblazers Such As Yelp Co-Founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-Founder Biz Stone, Paypal Co-Founder Max Levchin, YouTube Co-Fount Steve Chen, and Gmail Inventor Paul Buchheit Were Experimenting With Different Ways Using The Currency of Recognition To Produce To publish convincing content online for free.
As part of that noodle, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat on May 18, 2005, and obtained a crude thumb sketch up and thumbs for the gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews published on the site. Yelp went on to adopt the suggested symbol of Goodson and, on the other hand, adopted the “useful”, “fun” and “great” but “buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to join Martin Reeves to explore how the similar button became in his new book.
“It is something simple and also elegant because the similar button says: ‘I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,'” Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. “But it is very difficult to answer the simple question, ‘Well, who invented the similar button?’ ”
Although Facebook is the main reason why I like the button, it became so ubiquitous, the company did not invent it and almost ruled out as nonsense. Facebook took almost two years to overcome the firm resistance of the CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally presenting the symbol in its service on February 9, 2009, five years after the creation of the social network in a bedroom of Harvard University.
As with many innovations, the similar button was born of the need, but it was not the creation of a single person. The concept leaked for more than a decade in a Silicon valley before Facebook finally hugged it.
“Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this because it has a culture of meetings, although now it is less,” Reeves said. “Everyone gathered to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out that many of them were working on the same things.”
The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or consternation extended from an online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would depend on their ability to publish comments or videos that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback cycle that would not require many rings to navigate.
And when Goodson was trusting with his thumbs and thumbs down, he did not get out of the void. These signaling approval and disapproval techniques had been introduced in the academy prize academy film, “Gladiator”, where Emperor Commodus, portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix, used gestures for spare either kill Combatants in the sand.
But the positive feelings conjured by a date of overcoming the thumbs even further back in popular culture, thanks to the Character of the 1950s Fonzie Performed by Henry Winkler in the best qualified television series of the 1970s, “Happy Days”. The gesture later became a way of expressing his delight with a program through a remote control button for digital video recorders made by Tivo in the early 2000s. Almost at the same time, hot or not, a site that requested comments on the appearance of people who shared photos of themselves, began playing with ideas that helped inspire the similar button, based on the book.
Others who contributed to the group of useful ideas included the Pioneer news service Digg, the Blogs platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo.
But Facebook certainly converted the similar button into a universally understood symbol, while benefiting more from its entrance to the mainstream. And it hardly happened.
For 2007, Facebook engineers had been playing with a similar button, but Zuckerberg opposed because he feared that the social network was already disorderly and, Reeves said: “If he didn’t really want to do something that was seen as trivial, which would clarify the service.”
But Friendfeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now Openai Bret Taylor president had no such objections and released his own similar button in October 2007.
But the button was not successful enough to keep the lights on Friendfeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that agreement was completed, Facebook had already introduced a similar button, only after Zuckerberg rejected the original idea of calling it an incredible button “because nothing is more incredible than incredible,” according to the book investigation.
Once Zuckerberg yielded, Facebook quickly saw that the similar button not only helped keep its audience committed to its social network, but also facilitated the division of people’s individual interests and gather the ideas necessary to sell the specific advertising that represented most last year’s revenues of $ 165 billion of Meta Platform. The success of the button encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to embed it in its comments loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions: “love”, “care”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry.”
Facebook has not publicly revealed how many answers has accumulated since the similar button and its other related options, but Levchin told the authors of the book that he believes that the company has probably recorded billions of them. “What content does humans like … is probably one of the uniquely most valuable things on the Internet,” Levchin said in the book.
The similar button has also created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescentsThey feel torn if their publications are ignored and narcissists whose egos delight in positive feedback. Reeves sees those problems as part of the involuntary consequences that inevitably happen because “if the beneficial effects of a technological innovation cannot even predict, how could the side effects and interventions forecast?”
Even so, Reeves creates the similar button and the forces that joined to create it taking advantage of something unique human.
“We thought that the chance of innovation was part of the point,” Reeves said. “And I don’t think we can bore ourselves with pleasure or have our ability to complement so easily because it is the product of 100,000 years of evolution.”
