Better Likes

Better Likes vs Social Fixer for Facebook

Social Fixer is the classic Facebook toolkit — its "Stealth Mode" hides Like buttons and comment areas. Better Likes goes the other direction and brings emoji reactions everywhere on the web, with verified accounts and active maintenance.

TL;DR

Social Fixer is a respected long-running project (open source under MPL 1.1 on Firefox Add-ons), but the public store cards show its last release dates as September 2023 on Chrome and Firefox. On a site that breaks itself as often as Facebook does, two years without an update is a real risk.

Better Likes ships from a public GitHub repo with continuous releases. It also doesn't try to hide reactions — its whole point is to give you more.

At a glance

Better Likes Social Fixer for Facebook
Primary job Bring emoji reactions to every site on the web Modify the Facebook UI — hide noise, threaded comments, Stealth Mode
Sites covered Facebook, GitHub, Amazon — and growing Facebook only
License GPL-3 MPL 1.1 (per the Firefox Add-ons card)
Last public release Continuous 2023-09-09 on Chrome Web Store;
2023-09-08 on Firefox Add-ons
Number of reactions added Full emoji palette Zero — the relevant feature hides Like buttons
How "you" are identified Email-OTP → irreversible hash, one account per real person N/A — Social Fixer doesn't aggregate reactions
Permissions (Firefox card) YouTube/GitHub/Amazon hosts + our API host + storage Access to socialfixer.com, facebook.com, and matt-kruse.github.io
Public store reach Brand-new ~60,000 Chrome users, ~9,679 Firefox users (store cards)

Where Better Likes is the better choice

1. Active maintenance matters more than ever on Facebook

Facebook's DOM and GraphQL change frequently. Extensions that intercept its UI break quickly when they aren't maintained. Social Fixer's last public release on both Chrome and Firefox is dated September 2023 — almost three years ago. The author may still work on it privately, but as a user installing today you're installing what was last reviewed in 2023.

Better Likes is built around a deliberately small surface (one DOM adapter per site, selectors that can be hot-patched from the server without re-shipping the extension) and is being actively developed. Selector drift is treated as a routine operations problem in our runbook, not an emergency.

2. Your reactions exist outside Facebook too

Social Fixer's permissions cover only facebook.com (plus two helper domains). If you want richer reactions on a GitHub repo or an Amazon product page, Social Fixer can't do that — and extending it would mean rewriting it as a different product.

Better Likes was multi-platform from day one. Adding a fourth site (Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, an internal company portal via the selectors config) is a small adapter, not a fork.

3. "Hide" and "add" are different products

Social Fixer's Stealth Mode is for users who want to read Facebook without the social pressure of like counts. That's a great use case — and we don't try to replace it.

Better Likes is for the opposite person: someone who finds "one Like button" insufficient and wants to leave a more specific reaction (😂, 💀, 🔥, 🤔, 👀) where the platform doesn't offer one.

4. One real person = one real vote

Social Fixer doesn't have a server-side counter model, so the question of "how do you prevent the same person from voting twice?" doesn't apply to it. But it's the central question for any extension whose counts are aggregated. Most community-counter extensions (RYD, several YouTube-counter clones) sidestep it by giving each install a random ID. Better Likes doesn't — it asks for a one-time email verification, so a reaction count is a count of verified accounts, not a count of browser installs.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Social Fixer if your priority is cleaning up Facebook itself — filtering, threading, Stealth Mode — and you're comfortable with a long-standing project whose last public store release is dated September 2023.

Pick Better Likes if you want a fresh, actively maintained extension that adds expressive reactions across multiple sites and treats community counts as a verified-accounts problem, not an honor-system problem.

Install Better Likes See other comparisons

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