@evan My Gramma woulda said 'keep yo mouth shut!'.

@evan Consumating had thumbs down, people abused it

@evan No, but random emoji responses would be cool (a la Slack & Zulip)

@evan ActivityStreams supports the DislikeAction, but ActivityPub does not. We are leaving so much on the table.

@phaysis ActivityPub supports any kind of activity. It just defines side effects for a subset of the Activity Vocabulary types. But you can send other types through the network.

@wcbdata including thumbs down? And other negative responses?

@benbrown Reddit has downvote and it's a pretty essential part of their system.

@evan Ah right, fair. Didn't see a spec for the DislikeCollection so I assumed it couldn't support dislikes, but implementations can be extended at-will with undefined side-effects, heh.

@phaysis we don't have a spec for the `dislikes` collection! That's correct.

@evan Human reactions are rarely binary, so no.
If I understand a star correctly, it means 'you are seen/heard' and not 'like'.

@po3mah

Activity Vocabulary

(www.w3.org)

@evan Thanks for the pointer, until now I never read the spec.. Good to know.
I guess I'm using it wrong then

@po3mah NBD. It's definitely open to interpretation!

@evan actually, we need 4 of them:
like
like, but...
dislike
dislike, but...

@po3mah this guy gets it

Thanks to everyone who replied.

I am a Yes, but. I think downvote/dislike buttons are a great distributed moderation tool. Many of the microaggressions (and not-so-micro aggressions) that make social networks difficult could be helped a lot by peer moderation.

The "but" is that it is hard to implement well, and hard to ensure that mobs don't silence important but unpopular voices.

@evan So I said "no" but I should have said "no, but".

I don't understand the purpose of there being a favorite button at all, there's no algorithm so number of likes and dislikes doesn't change anything.

So my "no, but" is that they shouldn't have a favorite button either. They should encourage people to boost things, since that's how the "algorithm" works here -- favoriting something doesn't help other people find it so it is a placebo that gets in the way of actually spreading cool stuff.

@evan I think there is a required level of common understanding needed to really have like/dislike, upvote/downvote, or agree/disagree be usable without being abused - it doesn't translate well across online sub-cultures without some careful UX thinking and knowing your user community.

It works on Ravelry, which uses "Agree/Disagree" but there are two essentials there that I have not seen anywhere else: /con't

@evan

1) Common context and language - there are 11 or so million users but we all knit or at least do some kind of yarn crafting.

2) Individual users and group administrators can selectively enable/disable these "click to comment generically" shorthands - so if a group moderator doesn't want Disagree whining in their group, they turn it off; if an individual user doesn't want to be bothered by seeing these, they can hide them.

Also, Ravelry has 6 of these for nuance:

@evan

Oh, I suppose a third reason these work well in the specific Ravelry community is that it is actively and collaboratively moderated and has a very simple but well laid out Code of Conduct. And a longstanding culture of everyone there being on board with a clear understanding of what those buttons mean - "Disagree" is to be taken as referring to the objective content of a post, such as "the BEST way to knit is Continental" being something one can disagree with.