Facebook Reactions
facebook.com
facebook.com
I also don't get why everyone feels FB owes them a dislike button. It seems like that would be a bad feature.
Personally, I think it's a good change. It won't change Facebook much, but it certainly won't do harm.
Simply, for around a month we've been challenged to consider, is a dislike button something you might use? "Ok I suppose YES". Well then here's the new features. "Wait?! Where the dislike button you mentioned?". "Dislike! And crap that reminds me you didn't add the dislike button I want to use right now to dislike that you left the button out!!"
"It's important to give people more options than just 'like'" to help express empathy and sympathy, Zuckerberg said. "Not every moment is a good moment."
"Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, 'That thing isn't good.' And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that," Zuckerberg said at the time.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/15/facebook-worki...
I don't like the idea of a dislike button myself but was commenting that unfulfilled expectation was the thing that lead the peanut brigade to whining.
On the aggregate, however, I see it as a horrendously difficult feature to design adequately.
The purpose of reactions is to provide an alternative for people who don't want to click "Like" on stories of tragedy (e.g. someone's loved one dying, someone announcing they have cancer, or even something non-personal like a news article about a mass shooting) because it sounds inappropriate, like "ha ha, I'm enjoying your tragedy!". There are two reasons why this is important:
1. Some people want to exhibit support but don't know what to say, so they're not comfortable commenting. On more positive stories, they'll just hit "Like", but that would feel inappropriate to do on a more negative story, so they don't do anything even though they want to express their support.
2. Facebook's News Feed algorithm uses Likes to determine how articles are sorted in your News Feed. If people don't Like important stories because they feel the word "Like" is inappropriate, then those stories will be downranked because the algorithm doesn't know the stories are supposed to be important.
Reactions solve both by allowing people to both wordlessly express sympathy for and signal-boost stories that they feel would be inappropriate to "Like".
That's not the semantics of the Like button however. The Like button's semantics, as used by most people, are "I have read your post, don't have anything meaningful to add, and agree with you and/or express my post-appropriate social action but do not feel affected enough or close enough to you on the social graph to leave a comment."
The meaning of a Like is extremely contextual. And most people know this.
Granted, a lot of newbie users get confused.
You remember how you feel when you use a product. When I comment on HN I feel like I'm standing before a military tribunal that is trying to pick apart everything I say and find a way to disagree with it. When I use Facebook I feel nothing but love and appreciation from the people I know and care about.
You may think that's lame or that you're above that, but I deal with enough shit in the rest of my life that I don't mind having a cushy place online to communicate with the people who care about me. And I'll even put up with Buzzfeed and email-forward-worthy garbage to do so.
On a macro scale I think that's something the world needs badly. I think most people could do with a little more love and positivity in their lives.
We're totally not.
So, I think it still merely proves the point being made above it, regardless of its supposed intent to be funny at someone's expense.
Hell, even BuzzFeed, the pioneer of reaction culture, implemented Reactions but are slowly depreciating them.
It wouldn't really work, but it might be one of those features that drives more engagement because it's "unintentionally" funny.
And simultaneously, use all the emotions to train a ridiculously good sentiment analysis system.
For example, "I felt angry when you wrote that any realistic web browser has to support Javascript. I have a need for using a text browser to bypass abuses of Javascript on websites with articles, so I would like you to view <specific article> with both w3m and Firefox."
The "dislike" action would not fit the nonviolent communication pattern.
(Though the standing joke with LJ was that they could save space by eliminating all the mood icons except for "angsty"...)
There seems to be a cyclicality to it. We know too many people (see Dunbar's number [0]), we're fed too much information, we're overwhelmed. So invent Twitter, to reduce the amount of information coming in, invent Facebook, make it easier to maintain social connections with ever-more people. And then realise there are limitations to this, so Twitter starts a blogging service, and Facebook adds 'reactions', and now we're back where we started, no?
So, anyway, discretizing these 6 states and fast tracking them is ok, i guess. It certainly allows people to shade their like in an interesting way, but it blows away complexity. The simple like can convey more meaning, imho, based on the sender. A like from an ex-lover, for example has a different meaning than from grandma. In some sense, they're both "i'm thinking of you" but they're nuanced based on sender.
It's not super clear to me that providing the 6 states will actually convey more information. Really it just requires a bit more effort on the user. A guy hits like on a pretty girl's photo because of love or lust, same guy hits like on a fast car because of awe. The context is more than enough to infer the meaning. It does make the sympathy connection explicit, so that's something. The sad face is probably much quicker than typing in "sucks about the cancer, bro". Is optimizing that case for speed better for humans?
Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has tried in the past to change how society functions by limiting vocabulary[0].
Facebook's product is their userbase, they make money by monetizing their userbase.
Ideally there would be enough competing chat/message services that you could always switch when you're unhappy. That's not the case here. Facebook has an enormous amount of power over how the world communicates and I think the intentional and unintentional effects of any bias they introduce should be discussed.
But your reply literally made my head explode.
If you're not being sarcastic... well, I think Shank summed it up pretty well.
But I do get tired of the constant thing around HN whenever a company releases some new feature, people immediately post a "Well, credit should really go to XYZ who did it first".
Sometimes the other company did launch a similar feature first, sometimes the features aren't that similar, and more often than not, everyone is copying from everyone. (and that's ok)
The only thing that changes is that now facebook will be able to explicitly map the emoticon expression to the posted content - something that humans could do already given the contextual clues in the use of an emoticon in a comment.
Generally, people "like" the person far more than the like the content (i.e. it's various aspects of the person, e.g. status, that are primarily causal with respect to others wanting to click that 'like' button.) My prediction is that people will be unlikely to use these extra buttons because they confuse this essential signalling game. A 'wow' emoticon, for example - can often be ambiguous as to whether or not you are aligning with the recipient, or signalling negatively toward them. Thus folks will struggle with the fear of sending the wrong signal.
If facebook persists and people do start using them - then the result will be a greater number of signalling failures, increased conflict, and greater user dissatisfaction.
I don't believe I have ever heard someone use "Yay" in a non ironic fashion, but I'm not from an english speaking country.
So you could easily imagine a situation where posts by popular kids would get likes but posts by outsiders only yays.
I can 'calibrate' a Yay to indicate a negative sentiment based on context, but it's a bit jarring and not even very strongly negative. Examples like "Two more weeks of working overtime. Yay" is obviously a negative use but, to me, that's you indicating disapproval of a fairly trivial inconvenience or annoyance in a rather light-hearted way. If you really disliked something I'd expect a more direct statement like 'damn it' or your whatever your chosen flavour of profanity.
The idea of Yay as a general meme for negativity is very jarring, at least to this native reader, and I'd really struggle to imagine it ever catching on as a result. Hope you found this perspective useful!
If someone has already selected "Wow", "Sad" or something similar, it perhaps would be useful to just click on the icon next to aggregation rather than doing the long-press behavior.
I suppose on the desktop site, perhaps mouseover may show the reactions.
I think overall it requires more effort on the user's part as opposed to just clicking on the like button and moving on. Which perhaps was the reason for the like button's initial success.
And then I see this Facebook stuff at the top of all the tech news...sigh...how did we get here? I have no idea.
I have a feeling 'angry' will be used whenever you don't like what someone is saying: it's the same thing?
If you use Angry for dislike, you're inviting mockery. "Oh, this got you angry? haha loser".
(It's similar to HN's policy* of "prefer discussion to downvotes")
* EDIT: I mean culture; as in I've seen it mentioned a lot by users of the site, though it's not in the rules
Positive sentiment needs no explanation because it inherits the context of the thing it is agreeing with; negative sentiment needs explanation else it is somewhere between useless and nonsense.
Of course negative sentiment also "inherits the context of the thing it is (dis)agreeing with."
You glean just as much information from someone clicking Like and leaving no context as you do someone clicking Dislike and leaving no context.
I disagree; Perhaps a programming analogy instead?
if(x == 0) # when this is true, you know what x is, and what it isn't
if(x != 0) # when this is true, you only know what x isn't
Like with no context tells the receiver what the audience wants (more of the same); dislike doesn't (okay, so don't do this thing, but do what instead?).
That's what I mean by the analogy - "do this" is a much more useful statement than "don't do that".
Instead, both the criticism-giver and the receiver are better off if you went "This code is shit, /because/ so-and so, and you can improve it in this-and-that way".
Of course, a "I like this /because/" is also more constructive than a "I like this". But I'm sure there's been plenty of examples that no matter how many "I like this"-es you get, it only takes one "this sucks, you suck" to demotivate someone.
HN has never had any such policy.
Edit: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356268 and marked it off-topic.
Why don't I see down arrows?
There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments
after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on
direct replies.
To the extent that HN itself has a policy it was set years ago by pg saying that downvoting for disagreement is ok.
I'm surprised I've not heard that before; but either way, I guess I stand thoroughly corrected, and will know better in future. Thank you for replying to explain my error and not just downvoting :)