I see I cannot downvote this story, either.
Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#32While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you stop using Facebook. Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair: it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit competition within…
> for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.
I didn't realise this until my sister told me recently that I was "getting pretty good at Facebook".
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#33I see I cannot downvote this story, either.
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Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#34On a previous ratings-based site I was working on, we ran into a big problem: distinguishing not caring from not liking.
Because to "like" something, or give it 4 or 5 stars, means you both like it, and it matters to you.
But if you're getting notifications in your newsfeed about a particular band, for example, giving it 1 star could either mean you hate the band's music, or it could mean that you've just never heard of the band and don't want to hear about it.
Depending on the site, you may want to do drastically different things given the two cases, but I've never seen any site that successfully distinguished between the two things in an intuitive way. (And giving 3/5 stars is not really the answer either.)
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#35I 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…
Contrary to the reddit example, I think downvotes here on HN work out decently. I've mostly only seen spam, off-topic, rude etc. comments downvoted here.
Downvotes on HN?
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#36I 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…
You nailed it - wherever people can dislike, downvote etc. there will eventually be a lot of flaming, mobbing and other bad behaviour that discourages people from using that website. We have a forum where you can like and dislike posts and some people actually spend a lot of time disliking posts by people they don't like systematically (up to 50/day are allowed). We're now considering a very low limit for dislikes/day ...
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contrary to the reddit example, I think downvotes here on HN work out decently. I've mostly only seen spam, off-topic, rude etc. comments downvoted here.
Downvotes on HN?
Yeah, when you get to some level in karma points (currently 500, I think), you're allowed to downvote comments. Comments with negative score will appear lighter/harder to read.
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#38While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you stop using Facebook. Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair: it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit competition within…
> for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing. I didn't realise this until my sister told me recently that I was "getting pretty good at Facebook".
Upvoted, you're getting pretty good at Hacker News.
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#39I think this is shortsighted. The lack of negative rating is an issue. Even though social networks do not allow for them they should at least try to infer them as a 'hidden' or 'latent' variable (from the lack of sufficient amounts of up-votes after a large amount of views).
I'm pretty sure that G+ doesn't try to infer downvotes because of the large amount of sensationalism, alternative medicine, celebrity gossip in the "What's Hot" circle present in your feed by default. These type of posts would not rise very far on Reddit.
Also, downvotes are important when it comes to computing trust metrics in recommendation engines or buyer/seller rating frameworks especially if you want to be able to use transitive trust metrics (A trusts B and B trusts C therefore A can trust C). Negative trust ratings are useful in avoiding bad products or bad actors. The availability of these ratings would be quite valuable in helping with online transactions and give confidence to users the first time they buy from a new source.
Without the two data points, it is more difficult to determine the parameters of multinomial/dirichlet distributions used in, for example, subjective logic which can be used to build networks of trust. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_logic
Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook
#40> The truth is that people just don't dislike things online that often You've got to be kidding me. From what I see, and maybe it's just the places I frequent, that's what the internet is for!
I think constructive criticism is underrated. Criticism often leads to improvement which most everyone benefits from.
As far as his data, sure most people can't be bothered to criticize something they don't care about. But imagine if Picasso hadn't criticized Matisse or Matisse hadn't criticized Picasso. It's not really popular opinion that matters, it's the few people that give a shit that makes all the difference.