The act of liking a post became famous on Facebook. In February 2009, the social network incorporated the feature that made the behavior of Internet users change once and for all.
Who developed the famous button is the computer scientist from Denver (USA), Leah Pearlman. She is currently away from Facebook, but is concerned about using the tool she created.
In an interview with Vice's Julian Morgans, Pearlman said the "like" button arose out of a redundancy issue. "For example, if you wrote 'Let's get married!', all the comments used to be 'Congratulations', one after the other. I found it aesthetically ugly, plus every time someone said something with more feeling, it was hard to find the post among the redundant ones. So I wanted to solve these two problems at once," she explained.
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The development of the project took a long time, so much so that Pearlman's team ended up losing some designers due to frustration. Even so, it was necessary to take into account that everything should be transformed into a symbol, and words and formats needed a study so that they could be transformed into a universal meaning. On one occasion, Mark Zuckerberg embraced the idea and thus the jewelry icon was born.
For the first time, Pearlman felt the dark side of his upbringing. After she started posting comics on her Facebook, like any other user, she was fueled by likes. However, after several algorithmic changes applied to the social network, she realized that the response to her stories was decreasing.
"I was like, 'Hold on, I put my heart and soul into this drawing, but it only has 20 likes.' So even though I could blame the algorithm, something inside of me was like, 'They don't like me, I'm not good enough. I need to start buying advertising!'". So, to get publicity back, that's exactly what she did.
Morgans questioned whether she felt responsible for the operational change on the internet, at this point Pearlman recalled an episode that had a lot of impact in the last season of "Black Mirror", which the world turns on the throne of virtual validation. "When I saw that, I was suddenly terrified of becoming one of those people, and I thought I had created that environment for everyone," she said.
Even so, she does not advise anyone to force an opposite direction to likes. "Let yourself want to be liked," she opined. "I would say the last thing we need is self-judgment for anything. I think that's one of the things that created this epidemic in the first place."
For Pearlman, the "cure" for all of this will come naturally over time, when a different and more interesting platform emerges. "The experience of external validation doesn't even compare to true internal validation," he said. "Being deeply satisfied with myself when I do something I'm incredibly proud of — it's nothing a Facebook like can compete with," she concluded.
