like/ give someone a thumbs up
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How the ‘Thumbs Up/Like’ Button is Dumbing Users Down
Have you ever read the comments left at the end of an article or video? Comments used to offer useful, supplementary information that you couldn’t get from the content itself. It was a way to learn more about a topic by listening to the different perspectives others had. Today, the comments on most social websites limit people to two perspectives: ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. This limited view has changed the mentality and behavior of users, and the ‘thumbs up/like’ button is to blame. The ‘thumbs up’ game The ‘thumbs up/like’ button is the voting system used to rate user comments on social websites. They’re most notably found on Facebook, YouTube and other social news sites. If someone gives your comment a thumbs up, it means they like what you said. If they give you a thumbs down, it means they don’t like what you said. This voting system has created the ‘thumbs up’ game, where people see who can make the wittiest comment to gain the highest ‘thumbs up’ count. This game might seem innocent and fun, but it has reduced critical thought and discussion to almost nil. The quintessential example of this is on YouTube. If you look at the comments for YouTube videos, you’ll find that most of them are 3-8 word, one liners that sound like they came out of a bad sitcom. Many of them are senseless, vulgar and add little value to the content. Some users will even copy and paste a successful comment on one video to another just to increase their ‘thumbs up’ count. Some will outright ask for a ‘thumbs up’ to acknowledge assent. Some will crack a joke about the number of people who disliked a video that most people liked. The ‘thumbs up/like’ button has not just turned YouTube comments into a mindless game, but it has created an endless obsession for ‘thumbs up’ votes. This game and obsession for the most ‘likes’ degrades the comment quality of a website. It distracts users from discussing the real topics and issues at hand. Instead of reading insightful and original thoughts that teach something new, users read useless comments from people trying to score ‘thumbs up’ points. It has put more importance on voting than discussing. All emotion, no intellect Comments have become nothing more than a place for people to vent their emotions. You are given two choices, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. This format causes users to make simple-minded, emotional comments, where users are quick to express their love or hate. This causes users to constantly judge what they see and read, instead of fully understanding it. Human thinking isn’t limited to just feelings and emotions. It also includes the intellect, which is rarely seen in comments today. Users also have a tendency to express how they feel about other users. If one person says something another person doesn’t like, a heated argument could start, where insults get thrown back and forth. It becomes personal and more about one’s ego than about the topic of discussion at hand. This not only creates a war of words between people, but it can also create a ‘thumbs up’ war that causes users to abuse the ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ button. The ‘thumbs up’ button would be more useful if it was used to call-out important comments that add to the discussion. And the ‘thumbs down’ button would be more useful if it was used to hide comments that don’t add to the discussion. However, the buttons are used to promote the silly and witty comments, which might amuse people, but it doesn’t challenge them to think about the topics and issues at hand. Encourages groupthink, discourages independent thought The ‘thumbs up/like’ button can discourage users with different, unconventional perspectives from leaving their comments. The fear of getting judged and receiving ‘thumbs down’ votes by the opposing crowd might make them feel like it’s better not to say anything at all. Thus, the people who are likely to comment are those who tend to agree with the crowd. This creates groupthink and prevents independent thought from appearing in the comments. Since users see the ‘thumbs up’ button as the symbol of approval, it makes them even more docile to follow what everyone else agrees with. The ‘thumbs up’ votes dictates what type of comments will get noticed. This tempts users to leave comments that resemble the most liked comment to get their comment noticed. This prevents people from leaving comments that offer a unique perspective. Instead, every other comment is either a witty remark or one that parrots how everyone else feels. The result is a group of people who think and feel the same. Good for marketers, bad for consumers? The ‘thumbs up/like’ button isn’t only used on a few websites. It’s starting to spread quickly to a plethora of websites. This is due to Facebook’s feature that allows anyone to embed the ‘Like’ button on their website. So far, over 50,000 websites have adopted Facebook’s ‘Like’ button. Google has also started their own version of the ‘Like’ button, called the +1 button. How will this affect the way users perceive web content? Another question to ask is how will this affect marketers and consumers? Surely, marketers will use this information to market products to consumers. By knowing what people like, it makes their job easier. It’s safe to say that marketers are liking the ‘thumbs up/like’ button, but is this good for consumers? Should consumers worry that marketers will use this information to market products and advertisements to them? It’s been said that the ‘thumbs up/like’ button is to help users find the best content. But who really benefits from it in the end? It’s hard to say, but one thing is for sure. The ‘thumbs up/like’ button is dumbing us down. It has killed critical thinking and meaningful discussions in the comments. The idea of recognizing important comments does have value. But the concept of recognizing them through ‘thumbs ups’ and ‘likes’ is changing our behavior in a totally unexpected way.
Facebook Adds Like Button To Mobile Messages, A One-Touch “OK”
“Alright”, “Yes”, and the much-hated “k” just got a visual redesign. Facebook’s iOS and Android apps have rolled out the option in messages to reply with a one-tap thumbs-up Like button sticker. It’s a highly-functional flourish that replaces the greyed-out Send button when you haven’t typed anything. And while it seems simple, I’m finding it quite satisfying. Facebook confirms with me that the “Like Reply” button, as I’m calling it, was “part of a recent update”. However, it doesn’t appear to have been included in any of the “What’s New” release notes. That meshes with my suspicion that Facebook sometimes adds new mobile features and either doesn’t announce them, or notes them a few updates after they appear. Cheeky. The Like Replies are now available in Facebook and Messenger for iOS and Android, plus m.facebook.com, but not on desktop. Update: Path 3 had this feature first. It was included in the Path 3 update a few months ago. Path design uses a checkmark which I find to be a lot more ambiguous than the thumbs-up. Still, considering Facebook also added stickers soon after Path did, there may be a fast-follow trend emerging. Distilled Communication Stickers have blown up recently as people search for quick and vivid way to share emotions while mobile messaging. But usually you have to dig those out of a menu. Meanwhile, texting was built for efficient communication. One of the most common things you have to communicate is an ‘affirmative’. Yes to whatever you just said. I agree. I approve. I acquiesce. And so “k” was born. A one-letter affirmative. But it still requires several clicks. To open the messaging field, to type the letter, and to send it. But *BAM*, the Like Reply button does it in a single gesture. Facebook even has a Like button thumbs-up sticker, but this makes it instantly accessible in the right situations. The bright blue one on Android looks especially sharp. Yes, this will save you one second. But it could save you and everyone else that one second hundreds of times, multiplied by 750 million mobile users a month. Efficiency matters. I’ve always wanted this for text messaging. Actually, not just for replies but as way to signal to people that was lighter-weight than a text message. I called it the “nudge”. A little buzz, even more subtle than an SMS. If I said I’d pick you up in 10 minutes, and you get a nudge 11 minutes later, it means come outside. If it’s late and I want to see if you’re up, I might nudge you. If I’m free to meet up with friends and want to ping a bunch of them? Mass nudge. Much less annoying than “Hey guys wanna hang out with me? I’m lonely.” This is nice step towards my dream of openly interpretable binary communication. Try it out next time you need to confirm something via Facebook message. We’ll see if it catches on.
Facebook Reactions, the Totally Redesigned Like Button, Is Here
Your News Feed is about to get a lot more expressive. After months of user testing in a handful of countries, Facebook today is releasing “Reactions” to the rest of the world. The feature isn’t so much a new tool as it is an extension of an existing one; by long-pressing—or, on a computer, hovering—over the “like” button, users can now access five additional animated emoji with which to express themselves. Each emotive icon is named for the reaction it’s meant to convey. “Like” you already know—say hello to “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry”. The mission to build Reactions began just over a year ago. Mark Zuckerberg had finally conceded that the platform needed a more nuanced way for users to interact with posts, for the obvious reason that not every post is likable. “Mark gathered a bunch of people in a room and was like, ‘hey we’ve been hearing this feedback from people for a really, really long time,’” recalls Julie Zhuo, a product design director at Facebook who worked on the reactions product. At the time, users had the option to post a sticker or—gasp—leave a written comment on a friend’s story. But in December of 2015, 1.44 billion people accessed Facebook on mobile. Of people who access it on both a monthly and daily basis, 90 percent of them do so via a mobile device. Commenting might afford nuanced responses, but composing those responses on a keypad takes too much time. People needed a way to leave feedback that was quick, easy, and gesture-based, says Zhuo. Emoji, it seemed, were the best option. Emoji are more than playful shorthand for the written word. Nearly 70 percent of meaning derived from spoken language comes from nonverbal cues like body language and facial expression, says Vyvyan Evans,a professor of linguistics at Bangor University who studies the use of emoji in communication. “The stratospheric rise of emoji,” in text messaging, on Facebook, and elsewhere, he says, “is essentially fulfilling the function of nonverbal cues in spoken communication.” The challenge for Facebook was deciding which emoji to use. There are hundreds to choose from, but Zhuo and the design team wanted to keep users’ options limited. Too many choices would make the Reactions feature unwieldy. “It was really important that we made the thing people do billions of times a day [i.e. like a post], not any harder,” Zhuo says. Distilling the vast range of human emotions into a single row of emoji is no simple design problem, so Zhuo and the team enlisted the help of Dacher Keltner, a professor of social psychology at UC Berkeley. Keltner was a science consultant on Pixar’s Inside Out and had worked with Facebook previously to develop stickers, a precursor to Reactions that Facebook brought to Messenger in 2014. Keltner told Zhuo’s team that, to fully capture the complexity of human emotion, Facebook would need to include 20 to 25 different reaction emoji—enough to convey everything from fear to desire to relief. “But then you know, you’re constrained by engineering” says Keltner; 20 emoji, in other words, was too many. And Then There Were Six Facebook decided to focus on the sentiments its users expressed most often. Zhuo and the team began by analyzing how a subset of Facebook users from around the world used the platform. They looked at the most frequently used stickers, emoji, and one-word comments and found a few common emotional threads amidst an ocean of diverse sentiments. “When we built the stickers for Facebook the most common thing people sent was love,” Keltner says. People used the hearts-in-the-eyes emoji more than any other. They were also prone to expressing humor, sadness, and shock through visual means. The team took a subset of reactions that cut across the emotional spectrum and removed redundancies like sympathy and sadness, and joy and love. Then they tested them with users. Geoff Teehan, another design director at Facebook, explains that Reactions needed to fulfill two main criteria: universality and expressivity. Because emoji are nonverbal in nature, there couldn’t be ambiguity about what any of them meant meant in different cultures. Originally, Facebook included “yay” in their set of reactions. The grinning face looked happy; it was certainly an emoji that conveyed a sense of “yay.” Keltner himself says he was a major proponent of the celebratory emoji. “It’s such a good human reaction,” he says. But yay also conveyed a handful of other positive emotions like “love” or even “haha.” “People actually ended up using that one less than all the other reactions,” Zhuo says. “It sort of felt like it didn’t quite stand on its own.” Facebook’s Reactions bear a close resemblance to several established Unicode characters, with some minor tweaks here and there. The team attempted to exploit the subtle visual cues that differentiate facial-based emoji through a variety of stylistic choices. In early tests, the design team heightened the color saturation and bolded the outlines. They made eyes more pronounced or used unorthodox forms altogether, replacing circular faces with stars. Finally, they arrived at a major insight: In order to reflect a reaction, their emoji actually needed to react. When a user thumbs over each of the emoji, they animate like tiny GIFs. For “Wow,” the yellow face tilts upwards, its mouth agape. For “Haha,” a squinty-eyed emoji tilts its head back in a fit of laughter. “When we started animating them, everyone instantly got it,” says Zhuo. Other visual details like eyebrows make the faces more expressive, especially at smaller sizes. “Angry, in particular, becomes a lot more alive with eyebrows,” Teehan adds. Keltner says he suggested that Facebook incorporate voice into the reactions to clarify the signal even further. “One of the things I’ve been pitching to Facebook is to put in little vocalizations,” he says, adding that the voice is one of the richest carriers of emotional information. That, too, was an engineering problem. “Maybe in the future,” he says. Making Room for Reactions For Zhuo and her team, the next major challenge was figuring out how to shoehorn five new interactions into an interface that had previously afforded just three actions: like, comment, and share. The team toyed with various layouts. The most obvious option was to present all six emoji beneath every post, with a number signaling how many people had selected each. But that solution “began to break down even in internal testing,” says Teehan; posts with a lot of reactions became too cluttered with feedback. So they tried the opposite, grouping all of the reactions into a single counter. But this watered down the core goal of increasing emotive expression. “When we aggregate these posts into a single word like reaction we’re taking away a lot of beauty of the sentiment,” Teehan says. They found a middle road: Under every post, the three most commonly selected reactions will appear beside the reactions of your algorithmically determined best friends. You can see the full reaction-breakdown by clicking through. Zhuo explains, “As somebody who is just scanning newsfeed at a glance you could understand… the general sentiment of how people are reacting to the story.” Facebook has never been afraid to alter its design, and those changes have not always been well received. But Reactions is almost certainly a good move for the company. Looking past Facebook’s altruistic narrative about an expanded emotional palette, it’s really just a bid to increase engagement, which will ultimately make your news feed (and ads) even more personalized. Still, it’s well done. If all goes according to plan, the new reactions will integrate seamlessly into the existing platform. In two weeks’ time, we’ll probably forget they weren’t there from the start. As Evans rightly puts it: “This is an obvious step—to be honest, the only surprise I have is that it’s taken them til now to do it.”
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 His words is funny, I will give him a thumbs up.
2 I agree with his words, I will give him a thumbs up.
3 I am a fan in his facebook, I will give him a thumbs up.