The internet wouldn’t be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip.Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system, and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021.A new book, Like: The Button That Changed The World, delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that’s become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society.It’s a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp cofounder Russ Simmons, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free.As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson’s suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the “useful,” “funny,” and “cool” buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book. This image provided by BCG shows a sketch by Bob Goodson that included a crude concept of what would become the Like button on May 18, 2005. [Photo: BCG via AP] “It’s something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, ‘I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,’ ” Reeves said during an interview with the Associated Press. “But it’s very hard to answer the simple question, ‘Well, who invented the Like button?'” The social wellspring behind a social symbol Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn’t invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009—five years after the social network’s creation in a Harvard University dorm room. As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.“Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it’s less so now,” Reeves said. “Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.”The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn’t require a lot of hoops to navigate Hollywood’s role in the Like button’s saga And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn’t come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, “Gladiator,” where Emperor Commodus—portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix—used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena.But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, “Happy Days.” The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not—a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves—began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book’s research.Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo. The button’s big breakthrough But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn’t happen.By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a L