Facebook rolls out trial of 'dislike' button for downvoting comments | Hacker News Reader

Facebook rolls out trial of 'dislike' button for downvoting comments

theguardian.com

16 pointstheuncommon20 comments

Disheartening to see that Facebook is unabashedly aping the cornerstones of various sites (reddit) and apps (Snap).

That said, a downvote, or a "dislike" button, is almost always a double-edged sword - although it can be used to tune out hateful comments, it can also turn potentially meaningful comment sections into echo chambers extremely fast.

I do not see this turning out well.

I always thought the only way downvotes buttons should be implemented is that they're non-functional, in that they do nothing other than let a user take an action; you could perhaps then influence what that specific user sees in the future, to help get an idea of their tastes, or instead not actually affecting where a comment or post shows up in an order.

What is the purpose? What will downvoting enable aside from downvoting itself?

I have a sense it will only worsen the mob mentality on Facebook and make it more like Reddit.

Sorry to break it to you but HN is exactly the same. The difference is that the hive mind here doesn't like memes.

Groupthink still exists.

Hive mind exists everywhere, the goal is to not encourage it.

Voting on comments encourages it.

I don't use facebook, what is the purpose of like and dislike?

Is like meant to signify I agree with this comment. And dislike means I disagree with this comment or does dislike mean I think this comment is bad, O/T, abusive. Or does dislike mean something else.

What if you disagreed with the comment, but felt it was a good comment, well argued, well presented and fair etc. would you like it or dislike it?

I feel "like" would make it look like you align yourself with the poster, which you may not want but dislike seems wrong too.

Maybe overall like / dislike is an indicator of quality of comment, regardless of your personal alignment with the content?

I don't get it.

This is good because without a dislike button and karma score you can spew out any old unsubstantiated bullocks and people have to "accept your opinion maaaannn".

Say what you will about echo-chambers and stuff associated with comment voting, but IMO reddit/hn are orders of magnitude better than fb.

Will they have those dislike buttons on the Ads too which FB throws to our timeline?

So there's an upvoting button and like button as well. Do they go hand in hand?

Surely there's enough proof out there at this point that ranked comments do nothing to improve discussion, and that downvoting is always used as a "I disagree" button?

Are there any popular systems in which there are separate downvotes for "I disagree" and "I think this is a low-quality, inappropriate, or abusive comment"? Or separate upvotes for "I agree" and "I think this is a useful, interesting, or high-quality comment"?

Many systems have a flag option; although that is usually reserved for abusive or blatant spam comments.

Slashdot's moderation system (in theory) is excellent. It is more than a + / - button so I don't see it working in a faster-paced environment like facebook comments. I think the happy, sad, angry, and heart emoji-rating system they use now is probably already maxing out the amount of time a user will spend on rating something.

Yeah, some sites have proper reaction systems that let you rate a post on multiple basises. Slashdot's an obvious example, but quite a few forums have such systems too, with the XenForo version having options for:

Like Dislike Agree Disagree Happy Funny Surprised Sad Angry Winner Friendly Informative Creative Useful Optimistic Boring Old Bad Spelling

As well as whatever other options the site owner may have added. So there are systems out there which differentiate between a post someone disagrees with and one that's low quality, and they do make sure 'disagree' is not counted as a like or dislike on the database level too.

> So there are systems out there which differentiate between a post someone disagrees with and one that's low quality,

...which don't actually mean anything in practice because (1) disagreement effects perception of quality, so even honest voters in a system which distinguished the two will still be likely to mark a post that they disagree with as low wuality, and (2) people in practice, given the option, will mark a comment or post in the way that produces the effect they wish to happen to it, so if they want a post demoted because they disagree with it, and the forum offers marks for disagree which don't demote and some other mark which does demote, they choose the latter.

Dunno, never seen this happen myself on most sites with reaction/rating systems. Okay, the list of examples I can remember off the top of my head is only two (Wario Forums, The Admin Zone), but neither seems to have issues with people abusing the ratings system to dislike posts they merely disagree with.

Maybe it stops holding up on Reddit scale though.

I think the easiest option to prevent downvoting for "I disagree" is to have a dialog before the actual downvote asking the user for a reason (as seen on Lobste.rs)

Additionally I think the best option is to completely hide the downvotes from other users, especially in the score numbers. Ideally you don't show the score to anyone but the comment owner.

On Reddit, once you dip below 1, people tend to simply vote down even more. Not because they disagree but because it's a bad comment. It must be, it's score is negative. From what I've observed, controversial comments (when marked as such) are usually the ones that have initially gotten enough upvotes to stay positive through the downvotes.

Hackernews also has (IMO) some signs of downvote trains where people downvote comments with the shadow but HN usually quickly hides the comment or dead/flag marks it to prevent further voting.

In an ideal system I would also not simply rank by the score or a variation of it. I'd spray in some controversial or low-ranked comments into the high ranking ones to ensure that people with not enough votes get visibility even when the discussion has been going on for a while.

Personally, I don't find anything bad about a downvote existing, it just needs to be carefully gated and manipulated so as to decrease the usage as a "I disagree" button without people wanting a "I disagree" button nor that vote brigading/raiding becomes a problem. Furthermore I think it's important that people don't have the score of a post so as to improve the neutrality of presentation.

> Surely there's enough proof out there at this point that ranked comments do nothing to improve discussion

(1) I don't think that's the case, and

(2) Facebook's selling point to users has never been on being a neutrally optimized discussion site, it's been on algorithmic optimizing to show you what you want to see. Having a negative interest signal quite reasonably improved the data available for that optimization.

> and that downvoting is always used as a "I disagree" button?

Whether or not that is generally either true or desired by other sites implementing comment voting, given the nature and focus of Facebook, I absolutely do think that use of a dislike (not “downvote”) button for disagreement is perfectly consistent with Facebook's likely intent in implementing it.

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