Wow really? It’s the only thing that people care about and the reason why social media is both so addictive and so detrimental for mental health.
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Coming into the conversation late, and finding it fascinating. I don’t mind veering off into politics and thread drift. It’s happened to me a couple of times. For me what is more bothersome than the topic is the tone. I don’t know why I expect people here who share love of food (maybe because food is love) to be kinder to each other than what I see in other online settings. But sadly, they aren’t. There are just as many people on HO who use abrasive words, whose tone is harsh, and who are very offputting and temporarily upsetting to those people who simply hold a different opinion than they do.
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The mute feature is helpful.
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It’s a great feature for users we can’t ignore. I just stop engaging those whom I find aggravating, but I have muted a couple occasionally, for a variety of reasons.
I know it’s there. Sometimes the same person who is occasionally rude is also informative and delightful, and only 1 out of 15 of their remarks makes one bristle. So mute is too broad a brush. But I take your point that people will be who they are. You can’t change them, but you don’t have to participate. This is good life advice. But also, as in life, to fully be in it, you have to take the bad with the good.
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These might be relevant to you, too:
In the one below you will see that users have a variety of reasons for hitting the knife & fork button - often simply to acknowledge someone’s reply. I also found that the need for likes varies from person to person.
And believe you me, I fully recognize the irony of our exchange 
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Mute is the milder of the options, you still see their posts, you just don’t get notified about them on threads you’re watching,
You may be thinking of ignore, after which their posts are hidden (you can unhide later if you so choose) to minimize aggravation by specific posters (can be helpful when someone’s voice or tone hijacks a thread because they’re seemingly every other reply).
I think people care more about the actual information or do you post here for the likes ?
It is generationally different to some extent. There is an abundance of data out about social media, likes/dislikes, and how it affects the mental health and feeling of connectedness or isolation among teens. Having 2 teens (well 1 is teen adjacent), I can attest to it on an anecdotal basis. For us older folks, yes, social is great to follow people and also to share your own adventures. But it is frequently very culled and scripted. People tend to show their successes and not their failures. And there is still an emotional response to getting many or few acknowledgements from others that you really can’t ignore.
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Well, that’s not very knife.
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Dang, wish I’d thought of that one!
Spooner or later, you’ll have the right line ready.
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I have used in lot more discretion when forking since that " why do you" thread. My forking was fairly indiscriminate before that.
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Hopefully you didn’t catch a social forking disease (SFD) before you changed your ways haha. 
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I rarely fork. Mrs Harters says I need to improve my forking technique.
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Hmm - and here I’ve been using likes most often to help track which posts I’ve read. I’m still working to get used to the non-nested reply stream of H.O. and get confused trying to follow the give/take of lengthy conversations within a post.
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TBH I sometimes forget just how important those likes are for others, and, similarly, how those same people (well, mostly women) use them as a P-A tool. It’s a shame so many of us were brought up not to be straightforward instead.
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Also, tbh, I often “like” a post to indicate that the poster is important to me. Some days, I don’t “like” posts that I like because the poster never likes anything that I post. Other days, I try to be above it, and “like” what I like, regardless of that. I agree with you that social makes everything less authentic and introduces all these mind games that honestly, none of us need. But some of us thrive on.
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It’s a mind fuck I don’t need in my life. Passive aggression solves nothing, and it’s a cancer in human relationships. It also existed long before social media. It’s an immature and useless affliction.
I don’t play those games. I like what I like when I like it.
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I do agree. But it’s also addictive in the same way as any other addictive thing. I can aspire to be a better person than the petty-mindedness I sometimes feel, and also aspire not to care when I don’t get affirmation through those channels. In any case, I think now we are the ones thread-drifting 
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