Martin Reeves
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Well, that goes back to what you might call the evolutionary suite of human social behaviors. So how do humans deploy their superpower of social learning? One way is that they have a preference for what the scientists call homophily, which is essentially hanging out with people like me. Why? Because I'm more likely to learn from a community that's like me
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
learning about the same problem than people that are not like me. And interestingly, we use the word like to describe that. And there's this ambiguity in like. Like means I like the person. It also means I am like the person. It's an act of homophily. And a second one is, which comes to your point, is a preference for what you might call mild hierarchy.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So in the animal kingdom, we have hierarchy. Nobody likes to upset the chief baboon or the chief orangutan. Why? Because they use violence or the threat of violence to maintain the social hierarchy. Humans are a little different. We like to learn from people that other people appear to be learning from. So we like to learn from popular people. So you're quite right.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
We look at the like count and we like liked people because we become included in a group of people that are liked and we hope to be liked ourselves. And we want to learn from the group of people like us and from the people that are liked by others.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It's generally the case that when you create an innovation, it has this unintended beneficial effect. You know, like often the thing is good at something you didn't anticipate. And it almost always creates a new problem. With technology, it can happen very fast. So it can create social dilemmas as we try to clamp down on the unintended side effect.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
And one of the unintended side effects of social media is that it has an addictive quality, especially for young girls during a formative period of their social development. I mean, there's good science showing that they're very sensitive to... popularity and perceived popularity. They do compare themselves with others. And of course, the like button feeds directly into that.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So if your daughter's late at night looking at her own like count and the like count of her friends, and whichever post didn't get likes. It can be a very elating experience, but also a very depressing experience. And there's pretty good evidence that there's a pathology of especially young teenage girls that are quite distressed by the social comparative aspect of liking and being liked.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It's a very interesting innovation problem in itself, because if you can't foresee the beneficial effects of an invention, how could you possibly foresee the the negative consequences, which are really rather surprising. I don't think anyone anticipated them.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Maybe we all know the answer to that question because it's the same question as what happens when you're liked or disliked in real life. And I think that's broadly true. As far as we can tell, the brain chemistry of being liked and liking is exactly the same as the brain chemistry of
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
being liked or liking digitally, exactly the same, same part of the brain, the same dopamine release, the same mood effects. You know, we don't like being unpopular. We love being popular. It's as simple as that. So is there a difference? There is a difference, and it's one of quantity.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So if I were to try to meet as many people as I could in one day called Mike and curry favour with them, and, you know, if I tried really hard, I could probably meet five people called Mike and have a conversation with them, try to curry favor with them. And the friction of social physics means I can't really, it's hard to overexpose myself to these signals. That's not the case online.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
If you go back to this very first question, this important first question you asked, which is, how many times has the Like button clicked? The people that use social media click it multiple times a day, 10, 20, 50. And so somebody receives or fails to receive those Likes, And we can do that at this very socially formative early teenage stage, and it can be deeply impactful.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So it's the overwhelming of our evolutionary circuits by being liked or liking at a frequency that evolution didn't design us to handle.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Indeed, and the fascinating thing was, I guess technically Bob and I wrote the book, but honestly, that was not the way that it felt. It felt like we were being dragged along by this incredibly
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
multi-layered story of who invented the like button how did the like button become the basis for a multi-billion dollar business why the thumbs up what has this got to do with brain science how could you possibly regulate something like that it felt like we were peeling the onion and observing the story and and what was fascinating to us i think was um
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
just how much you could see in the microcosm so from one perspective you could say it's just one icon amongst many in the digital sphere amongst many in the human language sphere and you couldn't possibly generalize in this but but by focusing i think there's a certain fascination in looking at the macrocosm in the microcosm through through this lens of this very small humble icon you can actually see
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
A number of things, right? You can see the evolution of gestural language. You can see human sociality. You can see how human brain science works. You can see how social and serendipitous innovation works in Silicon Valley. You can see how businesses are born.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Yeah, my pleasure.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Oh, well, that's a really interesting thing. It's hard to say. We might popularly believe that it's Facebook because they, of course, pioneered the spread of the like button and used it as a central feature of their business model. But it certainly wasn't them. And the guy that I co-authored the book with, Bob Goodson, he was the first employee of Yelp.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It turns out that innovation, in the case of the like button and in the case of other inventions, turns out to be messy, serendipitous, social, many forgotten heroes, many delays. The eventual use of the thing actually turns out to be often quite different from the initial intention.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
The huge economic impact of the like button was that it enabled social media to become a business because by being a feedback loop from users, it could enable Facebook to say to advertisers, hey, we can tell you which part of your advertising is working and which part isn't. That's where all the money was.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
That was absolutely not the problem that people were trying to solve with the early like button. They were trying to encourage user reviews for restaurants that they couldn't afford to pay for. Without triggering a page refresh, if you remember the days of the page refresh, if you clicked any button on your computer, you'd have a 20-second delay while the page refreshed.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So it had to be done within the browser. That was the problem that people were trying to solve, and they accidentally solved a much bigger problem.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
When you click the picture of the Like button, it creates dopamine release, and it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Yeah. Well, you know, we did personally interview all of these people that were part of that community of people trying to do things with an instant recognition icon. And they often didn't have any awareness that they were doing anything special. I mean, every day consisted for these startups. And this is after the dot-com crash. So it was the nuclear winter in Silicon Valley.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
You know, these companies that were struggling to survive. We're just trying to solve another tactical problem. There were various tactical problems at the time. One of them was voting. How could you do voting? For instance, I'm not sure if you remember a site called Hot or Not. You voted on people's photographs. Were they hot or not?
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
You needed some sort of voting mechanism that aggregated clicks, but you needed not to trigger a page refresh. That's one tactical job that people are trying to solve for. The one I mentioned about hey, we're a restaurant review site. We need to attract restaurant reviews. How do we do that? How do we give people incentive?
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
We don't have the money to pay for these things like the Michelin Guide would. So how do we do that? Another one was cleaning up content feeds. Most people, if you give them an opportunity to comment on somebody else's content, they'll make a trivial comment, right? They'll say, okay, or great, or well done. And if you've got a whole page full of that, that's That's not very captivating.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
That's not going to keep users on your site. So if you can clean all of that and compress it into an icon with a little counter or something, that's another problem. So people are trying to solve these various tactical problems, and then they bumped into the idea that, hey,
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
You know, there's this perpetual problem since the beginning of time in advertising, which is half my advertising, as the joke goes, is ineffective. I just don't know which which half of my advertising is ineffective. And by enabling this sort of instant low cost response function, I like that. I like that person. I like that content. You know, essentially, you had the first effective product.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
granular proof of the value of advertising um which was the lifeblood of social media becoming a a multi a multi-billion dollar business and the thing that turned the digital marketing and advertising industry upside down but that was not the original intention so it's literally the you know the strict definition of serendipity if serendipity is a search for x and actually bumping into y it was it was essentially serendipitous
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Well, the like button, it looks like giving somebody a thumbs up symbol. And of course, that's not an accident. There was a very popular book amongst web designers at the time called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea of this book was that if you wanted ideas to travel and scale, you didn't want the innovative thing to look innovative, to look unfamiliar, complicated, clever, because...
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Things that make you think, things with unnecessary friction involved, are hard work. You want to hijack something that's already there. And why the thumb? Why the thumbs up icon? Well, it was a gesture that already existed in human language. It's not actually a thumbs up. It's a piece of code in JavaScript with a visual appearance of a thumbs up.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
When you click the picture and the piece of code of the like button, it creates dopamine release in the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens in the reptilian part of the brain and releases dopamine. And it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody. It's as rewarding to like something and somebody as to be liked.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It's the same brain center that causes us to find sex pleasurable. Unfortunately, it's the same brain center that makes cocaine addictive. So why did we never need an instruction book for the like button? Because it's plugging into something very cleverly that already exists.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
that because it is so powerful that someone would lay claim to it that they would say I invented the like button but nobody did why didn't they because the culture of Silicon Valley at the time and still somewhat the case but maybe less the case you know when you have conversations with these people that were involved in you know a version of the like button you know they were all talk
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
talking about each other's work in restaurants and bars. And there were meetups. There was a famous one called Squid Labs, for example, that it was a place where people gathered and talked about the latest cool stuff they're working on. So attribution is very difficult.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
right has the thumbs up and the thumbs down the thumbs down was obviously everybody that contemplated the thumbs up also contemplated the thumbs down and that would have also been picking piggybacking on the history of human gestural language but the way that the business model of social media evolved the advertisers pay for your attention uh using the proposition that using their uh
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
streams of like data and so on they can tell you whether your advertising is working whether it's going to work or not with a particular demographic they can target very precisely and if that's the case you want to maximize the the continuity of the attention of your users so giving people the ability to say You know, I don't like this. I don't want to do this.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It just doesn't fit with that business model. So the thumbs down button still exists in one or two places, but it died off pretty quickly. It was positive attention that people wanted.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Right. I mean, there was never complete convergence, as we've already discussed. I mean, some companies use the heart icon or a smiley icon. There was never complete convergence, the star system. One of the interesting things about the like button is that it's intrinsically ambiguous. and usable as humans use language in all sorts of ways. So it can be gamed.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
And also each company is trying to solve a different problem. So if we take Amazon, I mean, one of the things that Amazon is trying to do is trying to figure out which products to promote, which products not to promote. And also to seem like a trustworthy place to buy things. And one of the ways that they had of doing that, therefore, was to try to figure out a way of having reliable ratings.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So they have their star rating system. And then they also, I believe they're backing away from this now, but they had their rater rating system. So you You not only rated products, but you rated the raters and you had authorized purchases and it's done with stars. So that's a very different thing from trying to encourage restaurant reviews or clean up content feeds.
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
And they happen to go with the star system, yes.