[EdgeExplorer]

"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

[aaronbaugher]

> I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing.

I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

I'd be glad to use the system you describe; I just wonder if it would ever draw more than a niche audience without those features that many people seem to find essential to whatever they're getting out of the experience.

[squigz]

> I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

Just to be clear about something though: this sort of person existed long before social media, would still exist without social media, and will continue to exist long after the current evolutions of social media

[satvikpendem]

People are already moving towards the group chat model over the town square model, I read some articles on this recently that I can't find right now but it talks about the growth of Discord and the gradual decline of Facebook and Instagram. So I think people are already getting tired of such a like system.

[stickfigure]

I'll be honest, it sounds like you're trying to control my relationships with my friends and it sounds totally toxic.

I like the 1000 mutual connections only limit - that seems enough to get the job done. But "likes" are the online equivalent of the little "uh huh" sounds and head nods we make during real-life conversations to make the speaker feel heard and understood. This is normal healthy human interaction.

[EdgeExplorer]

My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.