Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
05 May 2025
Chapter 1: What interesting food facts are discussed?
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
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Today on Something You Should Know, fascinating facts about the food you eat, like why salmon is pink, what's the shelf life of a Twinkie, and more. Then, the Like button. It's pressed billions of times a day. Why do we like the Like button?
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.
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Chapter 2: Why is the Like button so popular?
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.
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,
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.
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
So the like button isn't a thing in the sense that there's a patent, there's a patent owner, there's a diagram of how it works. The like button is more of a concept, isn't it?
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...
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.
But there is something. There's something about the like button that touches a nerve or something. If it's pressed 7 billion times a day, there's something pretty magical about it. What is it that makes it so effective?
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.
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