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According to Elan Morgan, the Facebook 'Like' button does more than acknowledge your friends' posts.
"On August 1st, I announced that I was going to quit liking things on Facebook. At the time, I simply stated that I no longer wanted to be as active a participant in teaching Facebook how to advertise to me as I had been in the past, but another and much larger issue was my real curiosity: how was my Facebook experience going to change once I stopped feeding its engine with likes?"
Morgan discovered that, amongst other things, once he stopped using the 'Like' button, he also stopped receiving most of the dross that had been spoiling his experience of FB. He also found that he started posting more intelligent comments regarding information that he received rather than just clicking 'Like'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23 2014, @09:56AM
I found it intriguing that they use a site to keep connected but ultimately end up distanced and disconnected because they primarily interact via the "like" button.
Commercialism corrupts. Because facebook is farming likes for the purpose of selling ads they've devalued the function. If liking something had no other consequences beyond simply signifying approval, like a sort of "e-applause" it wouldn't have such a dehumanizing effect. Facebook's business model requires them to squeeze out as much value from like-farming as they can without quite going over the edge where they make facebook itself valueless to users.
It is like the way the ads in google have incrementally gone from straight-forward and well delineated to trying to blend in with real search results. Both companies want to give the smallest possible value that still keeps people from defecting to other services.