Is the Like Button dead?

Yeah, this one’s gonna be spicy. I’ve been… let’s say, challenging the thinking of professional social media over on my LinkedIn this week. Those comments + an essay I read from a very bright social analytics thinker turned into this week’s newsletter, which I’m pretty excited about—you know I love the chance to wildly speculate about what’s next in social media.

So today, we’ll hit on:

Truly hate it. I thinkkk I found a way to make it easier, tho.

Most of my travel beef is health & comfort related. I’m an oversized human at 6’5”, I sleep terribly, and I’m battling a bad back… naturally, that makes airplanes no bueno for me unless I get the right seats & flights, whichhhh is never easy.

Then Navan Edge hit me up to help out—they’re an AI personal assistant for my business travel. I literally just start talking to my computer with an “hey I need an aisle or exit row so my knees don’t break, also a flight that leaves after 11 am so I don’t wake up insanely early to get to the airport” anddd it spits out exactly the right travel options for me without me needing to open another tab. 

Just used it on an actual work trip, and yeah—it booked my perfect flight and seat right in the chat. For someone as needy about travel as I am, “just tell it what you need and it handles the rest” is a prettyyy nice change of pace. 

Nobody is smashing the like button anymore.

Let’s be real, here. When you’re mindlessly scrolling TikTok ten minutes after your alarm goes off (I know you do it), you’re not tapping the heart button or leaving a comment. You’re just gonna flick your thumb so the next Tok appears. Anddd you’ll rinse & repeat that for 45 minutes until you’re late for a meeting.

Even more wild, the algorithms don’t even need us to like or comment to know what content we’re gonna gobble up. 

That’s undeniably the way most social media works now, and the data proves it… yet most social media professionals are still highly focused on the likes and comments. 

But I genuinely think we’re moving to a post-like world. A post-engagement social media era. That probably sounds hyperbolic (or dystopian), but I strongly believe Social Media Marketers need to revisit their strategies and metrics for a world where people scroll without engaging. 

Pretty staggering drop-offs. I love how he checked his data, too—Gabe went back and checked if the top 1% of content experienced the fall, and sure enough, engagement was down 54% or more in the same categories.

The best content is getting dramatically less engagement than 18 months ago.

Took a look at SocialInsider’s 2026 Social Media Benchmarks report, too. “”Average comments per post fell on TikTok (24%) and Instagram (16%), suggesting a shift toward more passive engagement.”

That’s not a content problem or an algorithm problem… thatttt is a fundamental change in how people use social media.

While we’re over here panicking about declining engagement rates, the social platforms have already solved it on their end.

TikTok’s algorithm now weights watch time, completion rate, and replays as the strongest signals of whether you like a piece of content. They’re even tracking micro-watches (when you rewatch a specific segment of a video). Meanwhile Instagram’s measuring dwell time on carousels, and LinkedIn’s own engineering team said that how long someone spends reading your post is now a primary rank signal. Not comments or likes, but how long you’re staring at content.

If I watch 30 seconds of an emo band’s TikTok, I don’t have to like, or follow, or comment, because TikTok caught those 30 seconds and will give me more content from that band.

Everyone in ~professional social~ focuses on likes, comments, shares, and engagement rates. They’re just not the best metrics anymore, folks.

Hell, even Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri’s told us that. It’s all about views, watch through, and shares. Those numbers are what make Instagram’s algorithm go brrrrr.

We’ve gotta shift comments and likes to secondary status. They’re nice to haves, but they shouldn’t be the goal anymore.

If the future of social media is all passive consumption, we’ve gotta emphasize the new basics.

Watch time and completion rate become the metrics that actually matter. How long did they watch, did they finish it, did they rewatch? Those are your new 3 magical questions to ask of your analytics. Those numbers decide if the algorithm pushes your content.

Hooks become even more important. You’re not trying to earn a like, you’re trying to wave your arms, flash bright lights, and do whatever it takes to earn someone’s attention. You gotta hook ‘em so they start watching. No hook, no shot at retention, no algorithmic push.

Stop saying you’re “building community.” You’re not (and you never were, tbh). I see lots of Social Media Managers claim their comments are proof of community, whichhh they are not. A community interacts with each other. Your brand’s comment section is a bunch of randos talking to the brand. And like we’ve shown, that’s less frequent than ever now.

Yeah, we gotta shift metrics, but this is all because of the interest-graph era of social media. This new For You Page era means if viewers like our content, we can be seen by FAR MORE PEOPLE than during the Follower era. Our organic social content can reach our current customers, our potential customers, people with some brand awareness about us—the algorithms are truly brilliant at putting our content in front of the right eyeballs.

All you gotta do is become an expert in video best practices, and not worry about the validation of the likes and comments.