The internet graces this ability to make a living all the while being despised by those around you. In the past you had to watch your step unless you wanted to be executed depending on what stage of civilization you were at.
So why are there like buttons everywhere? It’s an innocuous idea, a low-effort way to engage. Likes, or upvotes, serve as a human-aggregate filter for news sites too – more upvotes, then surely the article is worth viewing.
So we can’t deny the power of the like button, the upvote button. If you want to manipulate others into your biddings, snuggle your way into their heart and eat away at their mind then you’ll want to make sure to like things.
Of course, there’s the other flip coin where it’s all innocuous and this reads like a paranoid sad sack who sees everything through the lens of a Robert Greene novel (is it even wrong though?) but anyway…
If you want to forgo the advantages of the neocities like button, you most easily can.
In fact, half the reason one may not even want to follow others is because of a lot of updates or comments on other pages and etc. You can disable those too! As long as you have ublock origin.
Now why would you disable one of the last ways to communicate, you horrible, horrible sickly ill paranoid – well, it’s because no matter how much one is liked if one can’t live by themselves and if one doesn’t do the work for themselves one may be abandoned in a few years time with nothing to show for it other than being liked for a bit. This is a cold conversation, an uncomfortable prod into the reality of the situation, and half the appeal of places like neocities is suspending the reality of the situation, but nevertheless so this cold conversation must state: these neocities followed and followers aren’t really in your life and maybe it’s sending the wrong message to your subconscious to constantly see and wonder if they liked your posts. You could hope to see it as a mutual nod walking by, but that’s the beginning and end. Parasocial relationships are the foundation of the internet, and it’s not like there’s anything wrong with them, but if you’re finding yourself more miserable, inhibited, distracted by entertaining vectors of parasocial relations like the Like Button then perhaps it’s worth drawing some lines.
Could one hope for an alternate reality where you actually make friends online? Sure, maybe, who knows. Every past friend attempt – where one is messaging one another on some IM – ended in misery & failure. If you don’t have some sort of mutual pastime like videogames – if you’ve been cursed (or blessed) with an inability to play any videogame anymore – then good luck. It’s in fact why there’s no email on this website: a certainty in how it would genuinely just leave all parties worse off. If you aren’t able to walk down the street, knock on the door, and chill in the same room listening to the court of the crimson king then the alternative seems to be a descent in mutual neuroticism by constant conversation leading to nowhere and you’re no better off when you inevitably feel the stagnation chokehold you.
Of course a counterpoint would be how who you interact with could shape you, maybe encourage you to work out for example. But do you really think so? Most people would be better off destroying their phone, deleting all IM, because at least then you have a chance at feeling content sitting quiet in a room alone. Hell, if you have General Anxiety Disorder or whatever the pharmaceutical prophets published last quarter a possible source of that constant anxiety would be the fact that anyone could tap you on the shoulder anytime with your notifications enabled and you don’t know how to set any boundaries so you can’t let your guard down and you’ll continue to subject yourself to others mood swings, long replies, interpreting something that means nothing, eating away your sanity over nothing at all other than a poor excuse of a distraction, a poor excuse of a relation, a nice sour-patch kid over the isolated world you’re sporting. With a destroyed IM, maybe then one could at least have a chance of having real life explorations, building a foundation for the rest of your life hopefully, maybe, oh well.
Whatever warmth one could possibly hope to scrunch together on here doesn’t fix anything. Past experience only teaches that as soon as you want any warmth, a hug, belonging and a place to share the doubtful thoughts it doesn’t work and makes things worse. The popular psyop online is being more vulnerable, being more sensitive – no one actually wants to deal with these things. They only do as long as you have a contract between, or they get an enjoyment gaining power over you through your dependence.
If you ever figure it out, be sure to contest this article in the comments below and make sure to emphasize how detestable this all is, pulling the mask off of these pastimes!
Back to the topic: if you would like to be as miserly and scroogely then you can install some filters on ublockorigin. Click on “My filters” and add the following:
neocities.org##.comment_like
neocities.org###like
neocities.org##.news-item.comment
neocities.org##.news-item.followThis disable all like buttons and profile comments as well as the list of followers at the top. Look at how much more clean it is! And how much more close-to-reality it is in terms of the day-to-day effects: whether you see these datapoints or not has no bearing on your actions, satisfaction, bountiful days ahead.
Is this an article detesting the like button? No, sometimes it’s nice to give nudges towards others, encouraging them. That’s fine. It’s engagement. Likes – and especially neocities comments – partly encouraged the development of this website! Thank you for your engagement – it’s appreciated. Life as a hedgehog just requires some doubts and protesting and distance unless you want problems.
Depending on your objectives you can rise and develop a cult through your well-placed likes – or just spread some love you could suppose. Likes are a way to communicate presence and presence is nice in a presenceless world, between drive-throughs and parking lots, missed phone calls and once-a-year meetups stumbling through whatever you bothered to do since last meeting. A quick “like” is a nice way to end a comments exchange too.
Though one could perhaps wonder how much one is settling for if they only communicate through ASCII. There’s so much nuance in a voice, and then body language accounts for a whole lot more than you could ever imagine. Oh well.
Anyway, still – if you find yourself too self-conscious, too addicted to these points-of-validation, hoping to be a little more indifferent to praise and criticism and in fact wonder the consequences of them, then give it a try.
…And so I did in the past.
You know what I inevitably found? Just because likes have this tendency toward digging into you depending on how people-pleasing you can be, it also cuts off a vector of genuine support. Instead of blocking the likes, it’s better to practice self-reflection and wonder how to handle the validation without it getting to you.
There’s nothing wrong with spreading likes while also not depending on them. May as well spread a little joy if you can.