A fair point, sonyaw! Something I've thought about a lot.

When the News Feed first came out, you couldn't "like" updates at all! The plan back then was to have chat, commenting, all of that.

Before users were able to "like" updates, people complained that the community felt flat — they'd read the news feed, but had no way to just interact with it. After likes went live, the feedback was: browsing the feed feels more active, live, engaging, because I can interact with it now.

Not long after that, we made the decision to change our approach to social. You can read about in my newsletter from Jan 2020: https://mailchi.mp/8ba4e7436fd3/34-not-another-social-site.

At the time, I thought about removing likes then, but people loved them and also said it was a way to discover other users who liked similar content/books.

And so there they've stayed. Up until now, we've viewed it as a light-touch way to interact with the site, without the noise of notifications, etc.

This isn't to say that "likes" will stick around forever or that there won't be a way to turn on limited in-app notifications as per your suggestion some time in the future.

Hope that history of the feature is helpful!

I understand the drive to stay away from "social media-esque" features, but then why let people "like" your updates at all?

Hello! We are purposefully trying to stay away from social media-esque features like comments/notifications/follower lists. :-)