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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

#41

Post by ByronT »

patio11 wrote: post #26

While 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…

Here's an interesting social networking concept: the mixture of real names with anonymity. Your name would appear if you "liked" something, but dislikes would be anonymous. You could also have the option to post comments anonymously. Of course, bullying and drama would certainly be more prevalent, but nonetheless, it'd be an interesting experiment. (I also think people would be less afraid to speak their mind when a friend posts something incredibly stupid.)

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#42

Post by willismichael »

ByronT wrote: post #41
patio11 wrote: post #26

While 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…

Here's an interesting social networking concept: the mixture of real names with anonymity. Your name would appear if you "liked" something, but dislikes would be anonymous. You could also have the option to post comments anonymously. Of course, bullying and drama would certainly be more prevalent, but nonetheless, it'd be an interesting experiment. (I also think people would be less afraid to speak their mind when a…

To continue your thought experiment, I imagine that if it allowed plugins or extensions of some sort (like facebook apps), somebody would inevitably write a machine learning algorithm that attempts to deduce who (out of a given set of people) wrote an anonymous comment.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#43

Post by anigbrowl »

Most things don't suck

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.

Not actually true. The abysmal stuff is filtered out for you by gatekeepers in publishing distribution, financing and so forth. If you want an example of how things look without gatekeepers, consider an unfiltered app store (like Android's a year or two back) filled with endless imitations and one-note ideas (Justin Bieber sliding tile puzzle! Miley Cyrus sliding tile puzzzle! Paul Graham sliding ti...you get the idea).

The approach of Facebook and G+ is that if you don't like something, ignore it and it will go away. This doesn't really work that well (see the other popular post about FB on today's front page, and the diminishing quality of Google News as more sources are added to it).

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#44

Post by snowwrestler »

The reason you can't dislike things on Facebook is that what Facebook calls a "like" is not a rating, it is actually a connection.

They are building a network graph, and the opposite of a connection is not-a-connection, which is the default state.

There's nothing "lower" or "worse" than the absence of a connection. This is sort of like the old joke that the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#45

Post by 6d0debc071 »

I wonder:

Whether dislikes, especially from an unknown walk-by, have a stronger emotional effect than likes. (And whether this varies by gender and anonymity of the attacker.)

What subset of posts tend to attract dislikes. (I could easily see questions and things like that attracting dislikes because they don't add general utility and then one dickhead comes by and decides to spit on someone for being ignorant/learning.)

Whether when people dislike something they're really just trying to make it less visible.

#

Though, since we're really talking about something's size in the search space, if people just ignore it it has more or less the same practical effect as it getting downvoted. Which makes the fact that something can get posted early in the day and be missed, and then be posted later by someone else and be seen kinda ironic.

I don't know, I've long thought that rating systems done on a per-post basis are really bad for promoting positive content. You don't get to customise it to show each user what they want, you don't get to cache any of your work really - and there seems to be something wrong with it, at least based on back of the hand personal eye-balling, that seems to make it wreck communities (i.e. since it's been becoming popular I've found less value in online discussion.)

Re: Why you can't dislike something on Facebook

#46

Post by Torgo »

MrBra wrote: post #15

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…

decentralized social network program pump.io has a dislike button. But features like this are implemented as apps, and so you can implement these kinds of features however you want. In effect a like or a dislike is an activity post on your own account with a backreference to the content, and others who subscribe to your feed see this. You can't aggregate all data as in a facebook "like" system, but I see this as a feature rather than a bug.
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