still don't understand what is the social point, what you are trying to communicate, by only liking a post on which someone has asked a question and asked for boosts on
"hey how do i do xyz?" "haha great post man"
this is almost worse than people liking my suicidal posts
@mavica_again I think what people want to communicate when they mash the like on your posts is that they hear you, they are paying attention to you, they see you, but they don't have anything more to say than that.
like, they don't know how to make it better, or they don't have anything useful to add to the conversation, but they don't want you to feel like nobody's listening to you.
It's like nodding irl, it *Can* mean people agree with the speaker, or it can just mean they're listening.
@pencilears it's a question with a boost ok emoji. there's no conversation to be acknowledged. i think you are talking about the latter point
@pencilears "does anybody know abcxyz? 
" "i love this post, gold star for you"
you are rationalizing antisocial behaviour
@mavica_again I'm given to understand that when I mash the like on posts from my instance that's one of the ways by which that post will show up on a federated timeline. (I might be wrong, I just post here.) It also saves the post for me for later.
In a place with an algorithm, liking posts does boost them to new eyeballs, so it might be habit, but I think in general, people mostly do not view mashing the like button as a way to communicate more than a passing nod of acknowledgement.
@pencilears in general people litter because nobody views it as making more than a small individual mess so we shouldn't change it right
@mavica_again do you also feel like when people make brief eye contact with you in public, or nodd along when you speak, that they are doing this with aggressive or thoughtless anti-social intent?
Your read on the situation is just really novel to me. Like, "mashing the like", is, to me, a mild social reinforcement, the smallest unit of friendship a website allows you to express, and you seem to view it as a loud proclamation of endorsement.