The "Me Too" reaction, and why there are no likes
A like button asks one question: do you approve of this? That's a strange question to ask about someone's third relapse, or their hardest week of grief, or the anxious 2am post they almost didn't send. Approval was never the thing they needed. So Steadyfy doesn't have likes. It has one reaction, and it only means one thing.
What Me Too actually says
When you tap Me Too on someone's post, you're not rating it. You're saying: I have stood where you are standing. That's it. Not "good post." Not "I support your journey" in the vague, performative way that phrase gets used elsewhere. A flat, specific claim: this happened to me too.
That distinction changes what the number means. A high like count on a normal app tells you a post was popular. A high Me Too count tells you something else entirely: how many people in this exact room have carried this exact weight. It's not a popularity signal. It's a headcount of people who understand without needing it explained.
Why we didn't just rename the like button
We could have kept the mechanic and swapped the label. We didn't, because the mechanic itself was the problem. Likes train you to write for approval, even without meaning to. You start noticing which kinds of posts get more of them. You adjust, usually without realizing it. On an app about telling the truth about your life, that's exactly the wrong incentive to build in.
Me Too doesn't reward a particular kind of post. It rewards honesty, because the only thing that earns it is someone else recognizing their own life in yours. You can't optimize for that. You can only mean it.
What it feels like on the receiving end
We hear this a lot: the first Me Too on a hard post lands differently than any like ever has. Not because the mechanic is clever. Because it's specific. Someone didn't just see your post, they recognized themselves in it. At 10, 25, 50, 100 Me Toos, that recognition doesn't dilute into a vanity metric. It just means more people showed up to say the same true thing: you're not the only one.
That's the whole point of removing the like button. Not to make the app quieter. To make sure the only thing left to say is the thing that actually helps.
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