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Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

benfrederickson.com

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Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#11

Post by arindone »

Some of the discussion here may be PART the reason...but only a small part. If you really think about what Facebook and Twitter are trying to do, they're trying to construct 'graphs' -- a social graph or an interest graph, depending upon which suits your cup of tea; and graphs are based upon connections. When you "like" or "retweet" or "follow" something/someone, you establish and create a link in this gigantic web of connections. Think of it like developing a system of telephone wires.

Therefore, in this model, it doesn't REALLY make sense to have a dislike or a 'dis-retweet' option because you can't create a 'non-connection' more than leaving a void space between you and said other object. That's why these words aren't in the vocabularies of these tools mentioned.

At least that's the visual mental model that I have, and I would encourage others to consider this.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#12

Post by rollo_tommasi »

Part of the purpose of the 'like' button is obviously help form a more complete profile of a given user in order to more effectively customize advertising - would incorporating a 'dislike' button make this task any easier? That is, would an approach that refines advertising content by filtering out subject matter a user actively dislikes have a substantive advantage over an approach that just focuses on homing in on what the user actively likes? My guess is that it doesn't, otherwise it would have been implemented already.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#13

Post by kcorbitt »

kghose wrote: post #3

Hi, since I can't leave comments on you nice post, I'm doing it here. * Thanks for putting up 'long form' posts which I guess what the kids are calling regular articles which take up more than 130 characters. * Thanks for writing about your work, which I think more people should do. * For the five star rating, if the mean is not 3 then the distribution can't be normal. It has to be skewed. * Thanks for making the nic…

Just an observation: it is possible for the data to be normally distributed with a mean higher than 3, that just means that the distribution is truncated closer to the median on the upper tail than the lower one.

However, just from eyeballing his chart the data in this case do appear to be slightly left-skewed.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#14

Post by arindone »

rollo_tommasi wrote: post #12

Part of the purpose of the 'like' button is obviously help form a more complete profile of a given user in order to more effectively customize advertising - would incorporating a 'dislike' button make this task any easier? That is, would an approach that refines advertising content by filtering out subject matter a user actively dislikes have a substantive advantage over an approach that just focuses on homing in on…

Not necessarily true -- you can report/dislike ads anytime/anywhere on Facebook and Twitter (maybe Google+? I don't use it really)

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#15

Post by MrBra »

Interesting for comparison could be Diaspora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29) github final comment on why they would not implement a dislike button (https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1474):

[...]

I can't find the records of the past conversations we've had about this, but the final decision was this:

A like (or whatever) button is a way to show appreciation without leaving a comment. It is pleasant to get likes, it provides positive reinforcement, and it's simple.

Dislikes would do the opposite, it's like someone spitting on you and not knowing why. You can express your dislike in a comment, which is perfectly adequate.

[...]

Moreover being Facebook a commercial system, dislikes would have negative impact on its advertisers. So I think that this togheter with the above reasons made up for a like-only rating system. No need to look for more esoterical reasons.

But still the article was appreciated and it might spin up interesting conversations.

Anyway, I'd greatly approve a dislike button :)

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#16

Post by sippndipp »

The problem with a full range rating (positive and negative) is that over time people will abuse it. We've seen this on an older web project (http://www.trendbuero.de/dk/). If you have a negative rating sooner or later little groups in your community will emerge and they will try to dominate everyone with their taste. They will call their peers and ask for downvotes. And when someone get's a lot of downvotes for a post it's unlikely that he will ever post again - he's scared away - forever. In a just positive rating system: If someone does not get any likes, he'll try again - maybe with different content. So traffic wise it's besser to just allow positive ratings.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#17

Post by sturadnidge »

potatolicious wrote: post #2

I don't think this is it. The point of allowing only Likes and not Dislikes seems to me a social thing rather than a usage thing. Netflix lets you "dislike" something (implicitly using star ratings) because no one sees those ratings except you. Amazon and Yelp let you dislike things because there is, for the most part, no interactivity around the ratings. A Yelp review or Amazon review generates no flame wars or ill…

I don't think 'like only' reduces the breadth of communication that much more than simple like/dislike does already. Especially if only the net difference is shown (1000 upvotes - 999 downvotes says a lot more than 1 vote.)

When I see articles upvoted on HN I'm never quite sure if the number of votes is telling me 'good article', 'raise your awareness of this issue' or 'good discussion about this in the comments'.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#18

Post by mbesto »

This is in sharp contrast to the rest of the ratings systems around the web...

That's because the like button isn't a rating system. The like button is simply capturing one subjective reaction (the desire to express your overall like of something with zero context) to provide a objectively comparable metric (number of likes). We're talking about apples and oranges here. Rating systems at least try to achieve feedback by providing context, likes do not.

Why people don't usually leave negative reviews - People don't dwell on things they dislike

None of the analysis here takes into considerations around the motivations of people to leave reviews in the first place.

people avoid things they will dislike, causing universally disliked things to remain unpopular. Its important enough that I thought I would sneak it in twice in different forms though.

Or maybe there are loads of hidden variables that are affecting this data. Like, for example, why people chose to write the review in the first place? I'd love for someone to do a scientific experiment to draw conclusions about humans motivation to write reviews.

Nobody sets out to write a terrible novel, open a crappy restaurant or create a horrible movie, and people mostly succeed in not being abysmal.

That chines restaurant down the street has value sets that people can't articulate correctly when describing their feedback (low price, quickly made, etc), and yet will get 1-2 stars on yelp for being "poor quality".

Recommendation systems are complex because we're effectively trying to scale subjective attributes into objective context. It will never perfect and will always be gamed. This debate will last for centuries...

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#20

Post by benfrederickson »

kghose wrote: post #3

Hi, since I can't leave comments on you nice post, I'm doing it here. * Thanks for putting up 'long form' posts which I guess what the kids are calling regular articles which take up more than 130 characters. * Thanks for writing about your work, which I think more people should do. * For the five star rating, if the mean is not 3 then the distribution can't be normal. It has to be skewed. * Thanks for making the nic…

Thanks for the feedback!

You're totally right that ratings datasets will skew positive. I was trying to get really get across that they aren't bimodal at all (unlike what some other people have claimed) and tend to look somewhat normal if you squint hard enough.

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