Why we don't have likes (and what we have instead)

Likes are a popularity signal. They’re also, unintentionally, a writing prompt: “post the thing that gets the most of these.” Every platform that has a like button eventually warps toward the kind of content that maximizes them.

When you’re trying to build a place for honest failure stories, that’s a problem. Failure isn’t likable. Nobody hits “like” on “I lost my house.” The button is the wrong shape for what we’re asking people to do.

So Surbias replaced it with five reactions:

• 🤝 Me too — “I’ve been there.”
• 🫂 Hug — “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
• 💪 Strength — “Whatever you do next, I’m rooting for you.”
• 🙇 Respect — “It took something to write this.”
• ✊ Solidarity — “Whatever this is, you’re not carrying it alone.”

These aren’t engagement metrics. They’re emotional responses. The difference matters more than I expected when I designed it.

What changed

When the only feedback signal is a like, posts compete on cleverness. When the signals are these five, posts compete on honesty. The thing that gets the most reactions isn’t the funniest or smartest take — it’s the one that sounds the most like what the reader is too afraid to say themselves.

Three months in, the data shows it. The five most-reacted-to stories on Surbias have one thing in common: they’re all messy. None of them have a takeaway paragraph at the end. None of them try to make sense of what happened. They just describe what happened, and people respond.

The boring truth

You can’t build a culture by adding rules. You build it by changing the shape of the buttons.

If you want to read what this design produces: /top. If you want to add to it: /post/new.