I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks.

She stopped liking, and started commenting. And maybe what she discovered is what old-timer bloggers remember the blogosphere being like before Facebook. Back in my day, we didn’t need someone else’s algorithm to show us what we were interested in. We clicked on insightful, valuable, and compelling comments to see what else the author had written, or we assembled our own RSS feed of authors we trusted.

When I disallowed myself Facebook’s Like function as a method of communication, I was left with this unmet desire to let people know I heard them or liked their content, and I suddenly felt invisible. I was reading, but no one knew I was there, which made me realize that my habitual style of Facebook interaction had to change. Without the Like function to rely on, I had to comment or risk looking anti-social and experience even more disconnection, so I started commenting more than I ever had before on the platform.

When once I would have simply liked someone’s photo of their new baby, now I commented with “What a gorgeous shock of hair.” When once I would have liked someone’s update about their wedding anniversary, I now typed “Remember how we hid from your grandmother in the gazebo and smoked cigarettes?” I used sentences to affirm parenting wins, share my secret to enjoying kale smoothies (blending the kale first), and make jokes about the sociopathy of house cats. —Medium.