As someone who worked at a rather popular social media company through the transition from "we're helping people connect" to "we're making all the money in the world" — not really.

In my opinion, it's not the likes themselves that ruin the internet; the like count is simply the number of people who agree or empathize with something. It's the algorithms that boost content that is likely to get more interactions and demote everything else. When I started, we didn't have much in the way of recommended anything. Your newsfeed was literally a list of posts made by the people and communities you follow, in a reverse chronological order, and nothing else. You had complete control over it. There were likes and reposts, but there was no way for something to be surfaced to a large audience without a bunch of people intentionally sharing it to their followers, retweet-style.

Without the algorithms meddling with what they see, people (usually) don't tend to chase like/share counts as much. There were civil discussions. People were simply talking to their followers by posting things — with no incentive to abandon everything human and become a "blogger". It was beautiful.