Apology accepted, as this is completely wrong 
Likes are a step toward building a ‘greatest hits album’, but the only place you’d see that is on your user profile, never in the topic itself.
The generalized concern is that seeing a like count will affect your view of the world, no different than the argument that twitter or facebook should remove likes. And it is a fair argument to make. I think Instagram did actually do that recently? Let me look it up…
One thing I have noticed that I’d consider a minor unwanted side effect of likes: you do start to notice their conspicuous absence. That is, every post in a topic gets 3-4, 10, maybe 20, maybe 50 likes… then you have a post float in that has ABSOLUTELY ZERO likes. 
There’s usually… shall we say… “reasons” that this happens and you’d probably agree with those reasons, too.
If you want a fun take on this, check out Black Mirror episode called “Nosedive”
