kin ko
Last week, I wrote about how I set up ckxpress.com with WordPress, which I’ve used for 20 years. Today, let’s talk about the opposite: the blogging platform like.community is shutting down, with operations ending on May 14, 2025.
First, some background. LikeCoin’s first flagship product was the LikeCoin button, which could be embedded in blogs like WordPress and Medium. Readers could “like” articles, and authors would receive LikeCoin from the Creator Fund and from “Civic Liker”, essentially turning likes into rewards. To promote blogging culture and encourage a reading and writing ecosystem outside of algorithms, LikeCoin also provided free space for users to set up blogs, which became like.community.
The immediate reason for shutting down is that I’ve joined Liker Land as Product Designer. Rather than designing new products on the foundation of LikeCoin v3, it’s more important-and more difficult-to cut underperforming products. In fact, Liker Land has long lacked the resources to maintain like.community; in recent years, I’ve been maintaining it and paying for the servers myself, simply because I couldn’t bear to let it go. Personal sentiment aside, professionalism at work means making tough decisions.
The deeper reasons are technical. like.community, like my personal blog, is built on WordPress, but to support multiple users, the mu (multi-user) extension was installed. However, mu has not been maintained for years, and continuing to use it carries risks. Of course, the WordPress ecosystem is vibrant and alternatives exist, but the migration workload is huge, involving over a hundred users, many of whom are unreachable-so this path is not feasible.
If there were enough users, migration wouldn’t be a problem. Ultimately, usage is just too low. Recently, I emailed a group of users about the impending shutdown and offered help to those who wanted to export their blogs. Only one person replied, saying, “It’s okay, just shut it down.” I thought shutting down would be a big deal, at least for bloggers, but the reality is nobody xxxxing cares. If you split the screen into two-imagination on the left, reality on the right-it’s like a meme. But thinking about it, it makes sense: most blogs have long been inactive. If the once huge Wretch (無名小站) closes down today instead of years ago, probably all we do is to sigh, what about a small site like like.community?
There’s a small incident I always remember. Back in 2018, when LikeCoin was founded, I attended the Hong Kong “Bloggers’ Spring Gathering” for the first (and last) time and tried to get LikeCoin to sponsor it. I say “tried” because at that time crypto had a bad reputation (maybe it still does?), and the organizers were hesitant. After some discussion, they let us sponsor, considering I seemed legit. That evening, during introductions, Alice said her blog was a Facebook page, Bob’s said his was on Instagram, Carol said hers was on YouTube. Naively, I realized that even in this circle, few people still maintained traditional blogs. To put it positively, “blog” had already been redefined as any kind of personal media-medium and platform didn’t matter, nor did openness.
The like.community homepage had just five words: “部落格重光” which in today’s terms can be translated to “Make Blogging Great Again.” In hindsight, that was quite bold. Seven years later, I must admit defeat: even fewer people blog, and even fewer know the word “blog.”
It’s hard to shut down something you built yourself; it’s even harder to end a product with a solid foundation and loyal users. That’s the case with the LikeCoin button.
Unlike the little-promoted like.community, which only had a hundred or so bloggers, the LikeCoin button was the flagship product during the “turning likes into rewards” era. It brought income to many blogs and citizen media, including Stand News. Even today, it’s still used on thousands of sites-independent media, court reporting, Matters, and ckxpress.com, to name a few. It’s arguably the most widely adopted LikeCoin product. So why shut it down? First, let’s explain where the rewards came from.
When readers liked an article, the author received LikeCoin from two sources: the public Creator Fund and private Civic Liker subscription fee. Users paid $5–20 USD monthly by credit card to become Civic Likers, and then distributed their support via likes. The mechanism was simple and successful. However, after the 2019 crackdown and the LikeCoin Foundation’s deregistration in 2020, the number of Civic Likers dropped to zero. Later, Liker Land switched to distributing LikeCoin staking rewards to sites that received likes and relaunched Civic Liker, but the momentum was gone.
As for the Creator Fund, after the foundation was deregistered, it was managed by a creator fund committee, which regularly applied for funding from the community pool to keep it running and distribute LikeCoin to sites that received likes. This shift from foundation management to further decentralization was a step forward for decentralized publishing. But after two years, with constant battles against abuse and falling token prices, committee enthusiasm faded, and the fund ran out with no replenishment for some time.
As I write this, I feel like I’m just making excuses. In short, the Civic Liker and Creator Fund couldn’t be sustained, so the LikeCoin button became obsolete. Whether or not it’s my responsibility, I’ll handle it during the LikeCoin v3 upgrade; unless a white knight appears, I’ll cut it off and do my best to help affected users.
This whole article is about cutting products, which might seem negative, but it’s not. Every community has problems, but the worst is when no one faces them, or when everyone sees the emperor’s new clothes but stays silent.
To help a plant grow, you need to weed and prune so nutrients go to the trunk and main branches. It’s the same for startups: only by shutting down stagnant products can you focus resources on core business. For LikeCoin, that’s the soon-to-launch “talking e-books” of Liker Land v3.
We’ll talk more about that later.
p.s. Recently, novelist D has been deconstructing himself, breaking down and reassembling his genes, even using AI to reconstruct and extend himself-maybe one day merging with AI into a new being. After setting the topic for this post, I thought it would just be a routine work summary, but as I wrote, the keys on my mechanical keyboard felt unusually heavy, and I had to press extra hard. I realized I too am deconstructing myself, examining each part that’s grown over the years, facing failure head-on, cutting away dead tissue, bringing in new elements, and trying to rebuild myself. It’s not easy, but I can make it through.
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