The Cultural Journey of the Thumbs-Up Gesture

It’s a button most people these days don’t think twice about before clicking online: the like button. But there's no argument that the button has turned into a powerhouse of an icon, with its purpose now reaching far beyond the creators’ original intent. So, how did we get here? Why was the button originally invented, and what can its ubiquitous role online teach us about our culture?

Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, and Bob Goodson, founder of Quid, are the authors of the new book, Like: The Button That Changed the World, which tells the fascinating story of how a tiny piece of code completely transformed the way we interact online. 

Martin and Bob join Greg to delve into the micro-history of the “like” button, including Bob’s original sketch for it when he was at Yelp, the role of serendipity in innovation, the booming business that sprang out of “likes,” and how the like button has shaped our understanding of not only online social interaction, but offline socializing as well. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How the like button transformed online behavior

23:50 [Bob Goodson]: So when Yelp was being created, it was not obvious at all that you could get large numbers of people to contribute content, because normal people who had the opinions needed to rate restaurants and bars and doctors and so on were not really adding content to the internet.

So it was part of that wave where everyone was trying to figure out, separately and for different business reasons, how do we get people to contribute content—which is why, in some ways, it was the movement of user-generated content. And nowadays we do not think twice about it. And the Like button—really, something Martin and I cover in the book—is that the Like button really greased the wheels for that process, because it is the simplest way to contribute content to the internet. And it still is. With one click, people do not think that they are contributing content; they just think of it as something else. Like it is a type of reading almost: “I am giving my reaction.” But it is contributing content. You are putting your name on something, and you are adding data to a complex system—which is why we call it the atomic unit of user-generated content.

A button that tells a thousand words

25:46: [Martin Reeves] There is something quite brilliant and impressive about the Like button, in a way.…[26:25] It's the simplest and most compact thing you can say that is actually meaningful to others. And so, there really is something quite brilliant about the simplicity of this thing.

When a small fix becomes a big thing

04:52: [Martin Reeves]  The strangest thing about all of the pioneers of the Like button—and we spoke to about 30 companies—was that none of them saw any special significance in the day that they made their contribution. They were just addressing that day's tactical challenge. It might be voting, or content stream prioritization, or something. And it was only later that the Like button turned out to be a thing. I call it the moment when a thing becomes a thing, and then—then it becomes a big thing. But it was absolutely not a grand design. So I thought, wow, this is the perfect story of what I had long suspected about innovation, which is: it is neither as planned as the hero stories we tell about it, nor as manageable as the managerial structures and metrics and plans and goals that we put in place to manage it.

The idealism involved before social media

19:52 [Bob Goodson]: We put so much emphasis on social media now that we easily forget. Before it was possible for citizens to share information, the only way to get information out there was through these usually individually owned, massive media companies. So there was a lot of dissatisfaction about censorship and about media being controlled by only the wealthy, and so on. So there was a lot of idealism involved.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Episode 64 of unSILOed feat. Martin Reeves
• Max Levchin
• Pollice Verso (Gérôme)
• Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
• Russel Simmons 
• Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Guest Profile:

• Martin Reeves’ Profile at Boston Consulting Group
• Martin Reeves on LinkedIn
• Bob Goodson’s Professional Website
• Bob Goodson on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• Like: The Button That Changed the World