Found this thread after Googling for how to turn off the "N people like this". It's hard for me to express how much I hate this feature and even more what it symbolizes. I'm frankly very tired of everything on the Internet requiring a "social" component. Sometimes I just don't want to socialize. My time spent in google reader is sort of like browsing a newspaper. If you're reading the paper (something I haven't done physically in years), you don't want to hear what people think about the articles. If you want that, you go turn on a 24 hour news channel or talk radio.