Well and do you care if other people like this debate or not? 😄

Because that's the core of the decision here: In the user interaction we have one person that wants to like a post, we have another person that wants (or doesn't want) to see the like AND we have hundreds of other people seeing the like on the post. So is it valuable for those "other" people to see the likes even when the post author doesn't want to see it?