🌱 the ramifications of Twitter's dislike button

I was actually listening to a podcast episode today that talked about why TikTok’s algorithm is so good. One of the theories they presented is that 🗨️ TikTok is great because you must ‘dislike’. TikTok, unlike every other social media system, has a very low-pressure “dislike” metric: whether or not you watched the whole video. So it’ll be interesting to see if this improves Twitter’s ability to filter out trash. It reminds me of how Reddit, because of the down-voting, is often more tolerable than I’d expect, if you’re in a community you identity with. Because the distasteful stuff to that community is often down-voted into the void. In theory now Twitter can say “the community didn’t like it 🤷🏾‍♀️ the community is self-regulating” when people get upset about Twitter moderation actions.

It depends, I guess, on whether a Twitter dislike button is more like a Reddit downvote or a Facebook like/comment. What’s missing in 🗨️ TikTok is great because you must ‘dislike’, but is discussed in more detail in TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day, is that TikTok’s swipe-away isn’t so much a dislike as it is disengagement. And we’ve learned from Facebook just how destructive an algorithm can be when it’s optimizing for your engagement alone. It doesn’t know or care, at its core whether your engaging for healthy reasons or unhealthy ones.

So we’ll find out, then, if it’s a good call. Even if it’s more like the Reddit downvote system, that basically means mob rule or Democratic rule, depending on your POV and how knee-jerk people are. Which, then, reminds me of 🗨️ Pushing to silence the right will backfire on the left because the left needs free speech more than the right does.

• Inspired by: as a dual hellsite citizen…
• Related to: [[TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day]]

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