“In an ideal world, self-esteem bubbles up from a perpetually self-renewing spring deep inside a person. But for habitués of the internet, self-esteem is more likely to come from “likes.” In 2010, likes unseated comments—which had long carried a high opportunity cost, in that they’d always been more likely to contain hideous insults and/or spam than compliments—as the #1 source of online ego-boosts. Twitter @replies and retweets were also nice, but likes were more effortlessly dispensed and more gratefully received. Users of Tumblr and Facebook had only to pause in their scrolling for a split-second to click a button in order to dole out their unstinting approval. By filling up the outline of a little heart (a heart on Tumblr, that is, and a thumbs up on Facebook), they implied deep understanding of everything from life-events—births, engagements, and sometimes even deaths—to jokes, gifs of Nicki Minaj making faces, and photos of corgis rolling over to show their soft furry bellies. The recipients of these likes knew how little effort their donors had expended, but they were—I was—still hooked on the feeling a cumulative pile of them evoked. A bunch of likes, you could tell yourself, added up to something like love.”