Does the internet need a dislike button?

Two thumbs … down

The "like" button has become an internet staple, a relatively standardized way to express some sort of positive reaction across all sorts of platforms. You can like a Facebook post, a Spotify song, a YouTube video, a tweet, a Netflix show, even an email in Outlook. They all do slightly different things, but the gist is always the same. You can even "like" bad news or something else you actually dislike, and people get it.

The dislike is more controversial than the like. Facebook never added one, even as it offered more reactions than just likes. But platforms like Reddit have long embraced the idea, using downvotes as a core mechanism for ranking what's good and what isn't. YouTube also put the thumbs-down front and center. Is it a game-able system? Sure. But so is everything on the internet.

YouTube rocked the web this week when it announced it was ditching the dislike. Or, at least, the public dislike count.

• The company ran an experiment earlier this year where it hid the dislike count, so users could click the thumbs-down but wouldn't see how many others had done the same. And apparently, it liked the outcome. "Today, we announced that based on experiment results, we're moving forward with making the public dislike count private across YouTube," the company announced this week.
• The logic for the change is pretty simple. From YouTube's support page: "We believe that this is the right thing to do for our platform — to better protect creators from harassment, help ensure smaller creators and those just getting started can thrive, and to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves."

The upside of dislikes is that they're an incredibly powerful signal. You might scroll past or skip over something for lots of reasons, but to say "I don't like this" requires enough intentional work that it sends a powerful signal that can be used in algorithmic ranking. That's why Twitter has been testing downvotes — which aren't even shown to the original tweeter, they're just a signal to the system — and even Facebook has a button where you can choose to "See fewer posts like this."

Over time, there's been a broad push toward hiding numbers like these more broadly. Instagram has experimented with hiding like counts on posts, for example, based on the idea that those numbers turn into contests and can make people feel bad. And since those tools still exist, creators get feedback and Instagram can still use them as signals for algorithmic ranking. Everybody wins, right?

But there's a convincing case for showing these numbers: They're one of the few signals users get about what's good and what isn't.

• "Here's the thing about the like and dislike count," YouTuber Marques Brownlee said in a video on Thursday. "When you put them together, it forms a ratio, and that ratio is the immediately glanceable piece of information that I can look at when I arrive on a video, to know if it's going to be worth my time to watch it or not."
• In general, platforms give users very little signal about the quality of the content they're seeing, or why they're seeing it. Letting users signal — to creators and each other — what's good and what isn't goes a long way.

The debate here seems to come down to transparency. The internet increasingly feels categorized and ranked in unknowable ways, and presented to users who aren't allowed to make choices with anything other than their attention. Giving people a chance to express what they want more proactively, and to help others find the good and avoid the bad, does feel like an important and useful thing. And there must be a way to do that without subjecting creators to dislike brigades and harassment. Otherwise we're stuck trusting the recommendation engine ... and we know how that goes.

— David Pierce (email | twitter)

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People are talking

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The (Amazon Prime) gift that just keeps giving

The worst part about sending a gift is having to remember the recipient's address. But Amazon Prime has a new feature that lets you send a present with only someone's email address and phone number.

By clicking on "add gift receipt for easy returns," you can choose a button that says "let the recipient provide their address." The person receiving the present will get a notification about the gift, which they can accept or decline. Now you have no excuses not to exchange presents with your long-distance friends and family.

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"All people — no matter their background or zip code — deserve equal access to tech tools, resources and training to help them prosper and thrive in today's digital world." - Rose Stuckey Kirk, Verizon

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