Before Likes Became Likes

Long before every platform put a heart, thumb, star, flame, clap, or reaction button under everything we wrote, people were already doing the same emotional mathematics.

Who liked this?

Who agreed?

Who noticed?

Who said something?

Who said something but did not press the button?

In July 2010, I wrote an entry about a very specific irritation on Ekşi Sözlük.

Some people would send me a message saying that they liked an entry or agreed with it.

That was nice.

Except they would not give the entry a “şükela.”

And apparently this bothered me.

I wrote that “many” of my badis did this.

Then immediately corrected myself.

By many, I meant three.

Three, written out for emphasis.

These three people had actually become acquaintances through messages like “I agree with you.”

We talked.

We got to know one another.

And yet, as far as I could tell, they never gave me a şükela.

This was unacceptable.

Not morally unacceptable.

Internet-statistics unacceptable.

The distinction matters.

I was not angry that they disagreed.

They explicitly agreed.

That was the problem.

If you agree, why is the number not moving?

This may be one of the purest early examples of online validation logic.

The private message says:

I liked what you wrote.

The visible counter says:

Nothing happened.

And somehow the counter wins.

That is embarrassing.

Also extremely human.

The old entry gets better.

I admitted that I was the kind of person who checked the recently voted entries constantly.

The green message light would appear.

A new private message.

A normal person might read the message first.

I did not.

First I checked whether the recent-votes area had changed.

If it had not, I would wait around five minutes before reading the message.

Then I would wait another fifteen minutes before replying.

A complete behavioral protocol.

New message arrives.

Do not open.

Check metric.

No metric change.

Apply emotional delay.

Read after five minutes.

Reply after fifteen.

Why?

Because apparently the sender had committed the grave offense of complimenting the content without updating the public statistic.

It is difficult to imagine a better little document of internet psychology.

We often talk as if social media platforms invented the need for validation.

They did not.

They industrialized it.

The need was already there.

Give people a public signal.

Make it countable.

Let the number change.

Then watch the brain attach meaning to it.

The technology can be primitive.

The psychology does not care.

A counter is enough.

One.

Two.

Three.

Nothing.

Refresh.

Still nothing.

Now the content itself is no longer the only thing being evaluated.

The number is evaluating the writer.

At least that is how it can feel.

The strange part is that the private message contained richer information than the vote.

Someone had taken time to write:

I agree with you.

That should have been more meaningful.

It was personalized.

Specific.

Human.

The vote was a click.

Yet the click mattered because it was visible to the system.

This is one of the central tensions of online life.

Private appreciation is emotionally rich.

Public metrics are socially legible.

A message tells you what one person thinks.

A number tells you how you appear to everyone.

Those are different rewards.

The second can become addictive.

Not because it is deeper.

Because it is measurable.

Measurement has authority.

If somebody says:

That was good.

You can wonder whether they are being polite.

If the number rises, the system appears to confirm it.

The machine has spoken.

Of course, the machine has not spoken.

People clicked.

Or did not.

At different times.

For different reasons.

Maybe they saw it.

Maybe they did not.

Maybe they liked it but never vote.

Maybe they forgot.

Maybe they agreed privately and felt no need to signal publicly.

Maybe the entry appeared at a bad time.

Maybe the people most likely to appreciate it were not online.

The number contains all these hidden variables.

We ignore them.

A metric feels clean.

Human behavior is not.

This is why online numbers are dangerous storytellers.

They compress messy reality into something visually precise.

Twelve votes.

Four hundred likes.

Twenty-seven comments.

Three thousand views.

Precision encourages interpretation.

You begin constructing explanations.

This post was better.

That one failed.

People prefer this subject.

Nobody cares about that.

They do not like me anymore.

I am growing.

I am declining.

Maybe.

Or maybe Tuesday was Tuesday.

The old version of me was already performing this interpretation on a tiny scale.

Green light.

Check recent votes.

No change.

Conclusion:

You messaged me, but you did not vote.

Then a mild punishment.

I will make you wait.

Not much.

Five minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

A bureaucratically proportionate revenge.

This is one of my favorite parts of the entry because it shows how quickly humans build rituals around tiny emotional injuries.

The injury was ridiculous.

So was the response.

I knew this even while writing it.

That is why the entry is funny rather than bitter.

I was observing myself being petty.

Self-awareness did not stop the behavior.

It turned it into material.

That may be one of the healthiest uses of writing.

You catch yourself doing something absurd.

Instead of inventing a noble explanation, you write down the absurdity.

Years later, it becomes useful evidence.

Not that you were right.

That you were recognizable.

The entry contains another joke.

I said that, to avoid making the whole thing too obvious, I would give the other person’s entry a “çok kötü” vote first and then send them a message.

Apparently this was my method for hiding the fact that votes mattered to me.

A brilliantly ineffective disguise.

You did not publicly reward me.

Fine.

I will publicly punish you.

Then privately communicate like a civilized person.

Life is not fair.

That was the cross-reference.

The younger voice is wonderful because it knows the scale of the grievance and commits to it anyway.

We often imagine the early internet as a more innocent place.

In some ways it was.

Smaller communities.

Less algorithmic optimization.

Fewer corporate attention systems.

Less pervasive identity management.

But people were still people.

Status existed.

Recognition existed.

Cliques existed.

Visibility existed.

Reputation existed.

People refreshed pages.

People watched reactions.

People counted.

The specific interfaces change.

The loop does not.

Write.

Publish.

Wait.

Check.

Interpret.

Repeat.

Today the loop can be much faster.

Notifications arrive immediately.

Phones vibrate.

Analytics dashboards update.

Platforms rank content.

Recommendation systems extend or kill visibility.

The writer can watch performance almost in real time.

This creates the illusion that creative work has a live scoreboard.

It does not help.

Some kinds of work become distorted when feedback arrives too quickly.

You stop asking:

Did I mean this?

Was it useful?

Was it interesting?

Did I express the idea properly?

You begin asking:

How did it perform?

Performance is not meaningless.

If you publish publicly, readers matter.

Ignoring the audience completely can become another form of vanity.

But immediate metrics can overpower slower judgment.

Something valuable may not produce instant reaction.

Something shallow may perform beautifully.

Popularity and quality overlap sometimes.

They are not synonyms.

My three badis accidentally demonstrated this.

They gave me qualitative feedback.

They agreed.

They initiated relationships.

In fact, I wrote that those “I agree with you” messages were how we met and became closer.

That should have been the success metric.

A piece of writing created conversation.

Conversation created connection.

What more could you ask?

Apparently:

a şükela.

Human beings are impressive.

Give us friendship and we will ask whether the button was also pressed.

That is the part of the story I find most interesting now.

The private messages had consequences larger than the votes.

A vote might raise a number.

A message could create a person in your life.

Yet the immediate brain values the visible reward.

This reveals something about delayed and invisible value.

The most important effects of writing are often difficult to count.

Someone remembers a sentence years later.

Someone changes their mind.

Someone sends a message.

Someone uses an explanation in a class.

Someone feels less alone.

Someone starts a project.

Someone never tells you any of this.

Analytics show none of it.

Meanwhile, a trivial post may generate enormous engagement.

If you let the metric define meaning, you will eventually optimize toward what can be measured.

This is a general systems problem.

People respond to measurement.

Measure the wrong thing and behavior changes around the wrong objective.

In software teams, measure lines of code and people can write more code.

Measure tickets closed and people can optimize for easy tickets.

Measure hours and presence replaces effectiveness.

Measure clicks and media learns to produce clickable things.

Measure likes and writers learn what earns likes.

Metrics are not passive.

They shape the system they observe.

My 2010 behavior was the microscopic personal version.

The metric existed.

Therefore I checked it.

Because I checked it, it influenced how I felt.

Because it influenced how I felt, it influenced how I behaved toward people.

A tiny number changed a social interaction.

That is remarkable.

The platform did not need a sophisticated engagement model.

A green light and a voting list were enough.

This is why interface design matters.

Every visible metric invites comparison.

Every notification creates a priority signal.

Every counter becomes a possible emotional variable.

Designers may think:

We are only showing information.

Users experience:

This means something about me.

The meaning may not be intended.

It still becomes real.

Social systems are full of these unintended semantics.

Read receipts are a good example.

Originally:

The message was seen.

Emotionally:

Why did they see it and not reply?

Online status:

This person is connected.

Emotionally:

They are online but not talking to me.

Follower count:

Number of accounts subscribed.

Emotionally:

Social worth, credibility, popularity, success, depending on the person.

The technical field is small.

The human interpretation is enormous.

My old “recently voted” checking belongs in the same family.

The system gave me a signal.

I built a story around it.

The amusing detail is the timing strategy.

Five minutes before reading.

Fifteen before replying.

This is social signaling by artificial latency.

People still do this.

Do not answer immediately.

You will look too eager.

Wait.

How long?

Enough to communicate that you have a life.

Not so long that you look uninterested.

Human beings turn timestamps into language.

The message itself says one thing.

Response speed says another.

In relationships, friendships, work, and online communities, we continuously interpret delay.

Immediate reply:

enthusiasm?

availability?

desperation?

professionalism?

Long delay:

busy?

angry?

indifferent?

careful?

There is no universal decoder.

We pretend there is.

My delay had a specific hidden message:

I noticed you did not vote.

You do not know that I noticed.

I am now punishing you through response timing.

A strategy of magnificent complexity for a problem nobody else may have known existed.

This is what makes passive-aggressive behavior so inefficient.

The punishment is often invisible to the person being punished.

You suffer first.

They continue their day.

I wait fifteen minutes.

They have no idea why.

Victory.

This is another lesson the old entry gives me unintentionally.

If something actually matters, communicate.

Do not construct elaborate signals and hope the other person decodes them correctly.

Of course, telling someone:

I appreciate your message, but I am strangely emotionally invested in whether you also voted for my entry

would have been ridiculous.

That reveals the more important option:

perhaps the grievance did not require communication.

Perhaps it required letting go.

Not every irritation deserves resolution.

Sometimes maturity is noticing the feeling and declining to build infrastructure around it.

The younger me built infrastructure.

Refresh workflow.

Delay policy.

Retaliatory vote.

Then message.

A complete distributed system of pettiness.

At least it had documentation.

I am glad it does.

Because this tiny entry preserves a particular internet era better than a broad essay about technology could.

Terms like “badi,” the green message light, şükela votes, recent-vote checking—these were not abstract features.

They formed habits.

Interface features become cultural behavior.

Years later, some of those habits sound quaint.

The emotional structure remains current.

Today someone may post something and check likes.

Refresh a video view count.

Check whether a story was seen.

Look at who reacted.

Notice one specific person did not.

Receive a private compliment and still wonder why it was not publicly liked.

Same story.

Different icons.

This is why I would not mock the younger version of myself too harshly.

The behavior was petty.

The susceptibility was normal.

Platforms exploit exactly these tendencies because they are powerful.

Variable rewards are especially effective.

Sometimes the number jumps.

Sometimes nothing happens.

You check again.

Maybe now.

Maybe one more time.

The uncertainty keeps attention attached.

I was doing this manually.

Today’s systems automate the invitation.

This makes deliberate distance useful.

Not because metrics are evil.

Because unconscious checking converts them from information into mood control.

The simplest defense is often temporal.

Do not check immediately.

Publish and leave.

Read feedback later.

Separate creation from evaluation.

If the work matters, give it time before turning it into a score.

This is easier said than done.

The brain likes fresh numbers.

I know.

I apparently knew fifteen years ago too.

Another thing I notice now is that the entry distinguishes two forms of approval.

Agreement and voting.

This matters because online spaces often collapse all positive reactions into one signal.

But human responses are richer.

I may agree with something and not think it is well argued.

I may disagree and still think it is excellent.

I may find something funny but not important.

I may find something important but not enjoyable.

A single like button destroys these distinctions.

People adapt.

Sometimes they use comments to restore nuance.

Sometimes not.

Early forum-like communities often produced more textual interaction because the mechanics encouraged it.

A message saying “I agree” had content.

Even if young me wanted the vote too.

Maybe the best systems are the ones where interaction can still become relationship rather than only metric.

The three people in my entry matter because they became people, not numbers.

I knew them through messages.

The votes I wanted are forgotten individually.

The fact that conversation happened survived.

That is a clue about what has durable value.

Counters are intense in the present and weak in memory.

Relationships are often the reverse.

A number can excite you for ten minutes.

A person can alter years.

We frequently optimize attention toward the shorter reward.

This is not only an internet problem.

Salary versus learning.

Title versus good colleagues.

Recognition versus meaningful work.

Convenience versus friendship.

Immediate measurable rewards compete with slower invisible ones everywhere.

The correct choice is not always the invisible one.

Money matters.

Recognition matters.

Metrics can matter.

But they should not automatically dominate just because they are countable.

Countability is not importance.

That may be the mature sentence hidden inside the old joke.

A message created friendship.

A vote changed a number.

I was watching the number.

The archive remembers the friendship.

There is another reason I enjoy this entry.

It refuses to make me look dignified.

Personal archives are better when they preserve embarrassing pettiness alongside major feelings.

If every old version of yourself appears wise, generous, and self-aware, the archive has probably been edited too aggressively.

People are inconsistent.

We care about stupid things.

We know they are stupid and care anyway.

That is part of the historical truth.

I could rewrite the memory now and pretend I was interested only in meaningful discussion.

I was not.

I wanted the şükela too.

Fine.

That is more useful.

Because growth is visible only if the earlier position remains visible.

You cannot mature from a past that has been cosmetically corrected.

The younger me checked the votes before reading the message.

The older me finds that funny and understands why.

Both versions belong to the same person.

I suspect some version of the habit still exists in almost everyone who publishes anything publicly.

You can become more disciplined.

You do not become biologically indifferent to recognition.

Humans are social.

Feedback matters.

The goal is not to become someone who needs nothing from others.

That fantasy usually produces its own ego.

The healthier goal is proportion.

Enjoy approval.

Do not let the counter become the meaning.

Read the message.

Maybe read the message first.

That would have been a good start.

If I could send one instruction backward to July 2010, it would be very simple:

The green light is already good news.

Open it.

Someone wanted to talk to you.

The number can wait.