The host at my karaoke bar in Southeast Portland calls everyone baby, and on Thursday he called me baby twice and then handed me the mic for a song I have no business attempting. I sang it badly. The room clapped anyway. The room always claps.
Walking home I thought about how little that applause actually told me. It was warm and it was real and it measured nothing except that eleven people were in a bar on a Thursday and wanted the night to keep going.
Which is exactly what a like is.
Instagram is testing what happens when the count comes off the post. Predictably, the loudest objections are coming from people whose entire business model is the count. Less predictably, most brand marketers I know are quietly relieved.
A like is applause for showing up, and we have spent six years building strategy on top of applause.
Here is what gets lost. The like was never a measure of persuasion. It was a measure of frictionlessness. It costs a thumb. Saving a post costs intent. Sending it to a friend costs a little reputation. Walking into a store costs an afternoon.
Every one of those costs is information. The like is the only one that is free, which is precisely why it is the only one anybody ever managed to collect at scale, and why an entire reporting layer got built on top of the cheapest available signal.
Take the count away and the questions get better fast. Did anyone save this. Did anyone send it to somebody. Did anyone write a full sentence in the comments instead of a flame emoji. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where a campaign with gorgeous like counts produced not one measurable human being in a store, and everyone agreed to call it a success because the number was large and the meeting was long.
The brands I expect to do well here are the ones already indifferent to the count. Trader Joe's has never chased a viral post in its life and has a customer base that will argue with strangers on its behalf. Patagonia publishes things designed to be argued with rather than liked. Oatly writes copy that people read out loud to other people, which is a metric nobody can screenshot.
The like was never a measure of persuasion.
None of this makes the work easier. Vanity metrics are easy precisely because they are vanity. What replaces them is slower, smaller, and much harder to put on a slide, which is the exact reason it is worth doing.
I am back at the bar in two weeks. I will sing badly again and the room will clap again. The clapping was never the point. I just like the song.