

Why you can't dislike something on Facebook - benfrederickson
http://www.benfrederickson.com/2013/06/03/rating-set-distributions.html

======
potatolicious
I don't think this is it. The point of allowing only Likes and not Dislikes
seems to me a social thing rather than a usage thing.

Netflix lets you "dislike" something (implicitly using star ratings) because
no one sees those ratings except you.

Amazon and Yelp let you dislike things because there is, for the most part, no
interactivity around the ratings. A Yelp review or Amazon review generates no
flame wars or ill will towards the user base.

So, at least from the examples in this blog post, that leaves Reddit, where
downvotes frequently embolden trolls, causes large amounts of moaning about
receiving said downvotes, and escalates flamewars as the downvoted have karmic
reason to fight more and with increasing aggressiveness.

Disliking things has a negative social impact. It escalates disagreements and
makes everyone simply observing the content feel just a bit dirtier for having
to witness the ensuing melee.

Sure, it reduces the breadth of possible communication, but people go on
Facebook and G+ to feel good and catch up, so a system where things can only
be liked and it's hard to hate on something is preferable, even if it is
unrealistic.

~~~
avar

        > [...]but people go on Facebook and G+ to feel good[...]
    

Very true, but to add to that another factor that shouldn't be underestimated
is that it's companies advertising on these platforms that are footing the
bill for their operations.

Fewer companies will want to advertise with you if their company/product page
can be disliked. To name an example Monsanto has ~22k likes
(<https://www.facebook.com/MonsantoCo>) they'd probably have at least two
orders of magnitude as many dislikes if people could "dislike".

~~~
DougWebb
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Sites like Amazon, NewEgg, EBay, and
anyplace else with a ratings system for products and product sellers seem to
do fine, despite the potential for getting negative reviews and ratings. These
are sales channels rather than advertising channels, so maybe that makes the
difference.

------
patio11
While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your
posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you
stop using Facebook.

Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair:
it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone
to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit
competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on
their photos is A Thing.) Facebook is not unaware of social patterns like
this, so they make product choices which make them less likely to negatively
affect Facebook's interests.

~~~
taejo
> for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who
> gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.

I didn't realise this until my sister told me recently that I was "getting
pretty good at Facebook".

~~~
willismichael
Upvoted, you're getting pretty good at Hacker News.

------
mbesto
_This is in sharp contrast to the rest of the ratings systems around the
web..._

That's because the like button isn't a rating system. The like button is
simply capturing one subjective reaction (the desire to express your overall
like of something with zero context) to provide a objectively comparable
metric (number of likes). We're talking about apples and oranges here. Rating
systems at least _try_ to achieve feedback by providing context, likes do not.

 _Why people don't usually leave negative reviews - People don't dwell on
things they dislike_

None of the analysis here takes into considerations around the motivations of
people to leave reviews in the first place.

 _people avoid things they will dislike, causing universally disliked things
to remain unpopular. Its important enough that I thought I would sneak it in
twice in different forms though._

Or maybe there are loads of hidden variables that are affecting this data.
Like, for example, why people chose to write the review in the first place?
I'd love for someone to do a scientific experiment to draw conclusions about
humans motivation to write reviews.

 _Nobody sets out to write a terrible novel, open a crappy restaurant or
create a horrible movie, and people mostly succeed in not being abysmal._

That chines restaurant down the street has value sets that people can't
articulate correctly when describing their feedback (low price, quickly made,
etc), and yet will get 1-2 stars on yelp for being "poor quality".

Recommendation systems are complex because we're effectively trying to scale
subjective attributes into objective context. It will never perfect and will
always be gamed. This debate will last for centuries...

------
kruhft
> The truth is that people just don't dislike things online that often

You've got to be kidding me. From what I see, and maybe it's just the places I
frequent, that's what the internet is for!

~~~
pjbrunet
I think constructive criticism is underrated. Criticism often leads to
improvement which most everyone benefits from.

As far as his data, sure most people can't be bothered to criticize something
they don't care about. But imagine if Picasso hadn't criticized Matisse or
Matisse hadn't criticized Picasso. It's not really popular opinion that
matters, it's the few people that give a shit that makes all the difference.

------
arindone
Some of the discussion here may be PART the reason...but only a small part. If
you really think about what Facebook and Twitter are trying to do, they're
trying to construct 'graphs' -- a social graph or an interest graph, depending
upon which suits your cup of tea; and graphs are based upon connections. When
you "like" or "retweet" or "follow" something/someone, you establish and
create a link in this gigantic web of connections. Think of it like developing
a system of telephone wires.

Therefore, in this model, it doesn't REALLY make sense to have a dislike or a
'dis-retweet' option because you can't create a 'non-connection' more than
leaving a void space between you and said other object. That's why these words
aren't in the vocabularies of these tools mentioned.

At least that's the visual mental model that I have, and I would encourage
others to consider this.

------
kghose
Hi, since I can't leave comments on you nice post, I'm doing it here.

* Thanks for putting up 'long form' posts which I guess what the kids are calling regular articles which take up more than 130 characters.

* Thanks for writing about your work, which I think more people should do.

* For the five star rating, if the mean is not 3 then the distribution can't be normal. It has to be skewed.

* Thanks for making the nice graphs, but please take pity on the color challenged and use much brighter and color blind friendly colors (or simply use gray scale, which would work just fine for your data).

Again, nice work on doing market research and putting up your findings for us
to see.

I especially like that you develop a hypothesis at the end of your data
description.

~~~
benfrederickson
Thanks for the feedback!

You're totally right that ratings datasets will skew positive. I was trying to
get really get across that they aren't bimodal at all (unlike what some other
people have claimed) and tend to look somewhat normal if you squint hard
enough.

------
MrBra
Interesting for comparison could be Diaspora
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29>) github final
comment on why they would not implement a dislike button
(<https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1474>):

[...]

I can't find the records of the past conversations we've had about this, but
the final decision was this:

A like (or whatever) button is a way to show appreciation without leaving a
comment. It is pleasant to get likes, it provides positive reinforcement, and
it's simple.

Dislikes would do the opposite, it's like someone spitting on you and not
knowing why. You can express your dislike in a comment, which is perfectly
adequate.

[...]

Moreover being Facebook a commercial system, dislikes would have negative
impact on its advertisers. So I think that this togheter with the above
reasons made up for a like-only rating system. No need to look for more
esoterical reasons.

But still the article was appreciated and it might spin up interesting
conversations.

Anyway, I'd greatly approve a dislike button :)

~~~
Torgo
decentralized social network program pump.io has a dislike button. But
features like this are implemented as apps, and so you can implement these
kinds of features however you want. In effect a like or a dislike is an
activity post on your own account with a backreference to the content, and
others who subscribe to your feed see this. You can't aggregate all data as in
a facebook "like" system, but I see this as a feature rather than a bug.

------
anigbrowl
_Most things don't suck

Nobody sets out to write a terrible novel, open a crappy restaurant or create
a horrible movie, and people mostly succeed in not being abysmal._

Not actually true. The abysmal stuff is filtered out for you by gatekeepers in
publishing distribution, financing and so forth. If you want an example of how
things look without gatekeepers, consider an unfiltered app store (like
Android's a year or two back) filled with endless imitations and one-note
ideas (Justin Bieber sliding tile puzzle! Miley Cyrus sliding tile puzzzle!
Paul Graham sliding ti...you get the idea).

The approach of Facebook and G+ is that if you don't like something, ignore it
and it will go away. This doesn't really work that well (see the other popular
post about FB on today's front page, and the diminishing quality of Google
News as more sources are added to it).

------
phwd
You can't dislike something on Facebook because users will feel discouraged.
The whole point of Facebook is to share content with people you know and have
content shared with you. By participating in the "negative" this goes counter
to that idea.

Facebook is an identity/friend/family driven network, you wouldn't like seeing
that John and Mary disliked your marriage. This works perfect in an HN/Reddit
environment since you can dissociate yourself and provide pseudonymity.

As for Facebook Pages, maybe there is potential here. Though again unless you
are a big brand, I don't know with certainty whether a post with 10 dislikes
and faces attached to them is better than no likes at all.

The OP has an interesting way to look at it, though, I'm pretty sure this has
been explained more than once by Facebook Engineers.

------
sippndipp
The problem with a full range rating (positive and negative) is that over time
people will abuse it. We've seen this on an older web project
(<http://www.trendbuero.de/dk/>). If you have a negative rating sooner or
later little groups in your community will emerge and they will try to
dominate everyone with their taste. They will call their peers and ask for
downvotes. And when someone get's a lot of downvotes for a post it's unlikely
that he will ever post again - he's scared away - forever. In a just positive
rating system: If someone does not get any likes, he'll try again - maybe with
different content. So traffic wise it's besser to just allow positive ratings.

------
BenoitEssiambre
I think this is shortsighted. The lack of negative rating is an issue. Even
though social networks do not allow for them they should at least try to infer
them as a 'hidden' or 'latent' variable (from the lack of sufficient amounts
of up-votes after a large amount of views).

I'm pretty sure that G+ doesn't try to infer downvotes because of the large
amount of sensationalism, alternative medicine, celebrity gossip in the
"What's Hot" circle present in your feed by default. These type of posts would
not rise very far on Reddit.

Also, downvotes are important when it comes to computing trust metrics in
recommendation engines or buyer/seller rating frameworks especially if you
want to be able to use transitive trust metrics (A trusts B and B trusts C
therefore A can trust C). Negative trust ratings are useful in avoiding bad
products or bad actors. The availability of these ratings would be quite
valuable in helping with online transactions and give confidence to users the
first time they buy from a new source.

Without the two data points, it is more difficult to determine the parameters
of multinomial/dirichlet distributions used in, for example, subjective logic
which can be used to build networks of trust. see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_logic>

------
eksith
A score is punishment or reward by consensus. I always thought the reason was
psychological. There's a (very difficult to subdue) urge for a lot of people
to punish those they disagree with; individual merits of the argument be
damned.

I've seen it here, and it can't be discounted as just a downvote for tone. I
think the wisdom of not being able to downvote someone who has replied to you
really shines here (along with Slashdot's more extreme example of killing any
mod points on a thread you're participating). It sort of forces you to be more
objective before dishing out punishment.

The positive distribution may be skewed due to self-censorship to some degree.
People tend to look at their score if it's displayed (one of the reasons, I
wish "karma" was not shown and instead showed a Slashdot style label score for
community standing). There may genuinely be more likable things than unlikable
things since scoring of some sort with a very specific number is involved.

I'm more inclined to believe the negative review assessment. It is true that
_most_ folks just browse away to something more uplifting if the conversation
or the story itself has become toxic.

------
modeless
I think the conclusion here is wrong. There may be fewer negative ratings, but
it doesn't necessarily follow that they are less valuable for making
recommendations. In fact they may be more valuable. If people go around
indiscriminately "liking" random things, but reserve their "dislikes" for
things they really hate, then "dislikes" might actually carry more useful
information about their preferences than "likes".

------
crazygringo
On a previous ratings-based site I was working on, we ran into a big problem:
distinguishing _not caring_ from _not liking_.

Because to "like" something, or give it 4 or 5 stars, means you both like it,
_and_ it matters to you.

But if you're getting notifications in your newsfeed about a particular band,
for example, giving it 1 star could either mean you hate the band's music, or
it could mean that you've just never heard of the band and don't want to hear
about it.

Depending on the site, you may want to do drastically different things given
the two cases, but I've never seen any site that successfully distinguished
between the two things in an intuitive way. (And giving 3/5 stars is not
really the answer either.)

------
claudius
I must be a very strange/negative person, as I tend to downvote much more
often than I upvote, be it on SE[0] or HN.

I also killfile people much more quickly than others, or so I was told. Maybe
I’m just angry and hate everyone =)

[0] Not really using it anymore, though.

------
rollo_tommasi
Part of the purpose of the 'like' button is obviously help form a more
complete profile of a given user in order to more effectively customize
advertising - would incorporating a 'dislike' button make this task any
easier? That is, would an approach that refines advertising content by
filtering out subject matter a user actively dislikes have a substantive
advantage over an approach that just focuses on homing in on what the user
actively likes? My guess is that it doesn't, otherwise it would have been
implemented already.

~~~
arindone
Not necessarily true -- you can report/dislike ads anytime/anywhere on
Facebook and Twitter (maybe Google+? I don't use it really)

------
smalldaddy
Consider the burgeoning community of Redditors. Up-vote AND down-vote are
integral to Reddit's success.

The article's hypothesis needs MUCH more work/research.

------
shardling
I think it would be interesting for Facebook to allow the user to set/select
additional interaction verb-names. So you could have "dislike" button if the
poster _wanted_ it there.

My local newspaper often has stories that say "small child dies in horrific
house fire" [like this on facebook], which seems.... inappropriate.

~~~
Fuzzwah
The lack of an option for the author to change the verb really does suck.
People wanting to show empathy to someone's post on facebook about something
shitty which has happened ends up in a long thread of sad faces, which kind of
shit up any real conversation which takes place.

Being able to make a thumbs down available for select posts would solve that.

------
shurcooL
Haha, it's funny because if how accurate it is for me on HN. I see both up and
downvote buttons, and it simply slows me down with a risk of pressing the
wrong one. I never downvote comments I dislike, I just ignore them and upvote
good ones. So I'd prefer to hide my downvote button.

------
msie
There are some newspaper websites powered by Facebook comments. I wish I could
downvote some of the comments I see there. I see some of the most terrible
comments get liked a lot and the commenters become star commenters (or
whatever FB calls them).

------
macspoofing
>I think the biggest reason is that even if they did offer a dislike button,
people just wouldn't use it often enough to justify the precious screen real
estate it would take up.

Ha! Let's test that, shall we.

------
chopsueyar
I see I cannot downvote this story, either.

------
bluedino
I guess this disproves the old "People are more likely to go online and say
something bad, than something good."

------
snowwrestler
The reason you can't dislike things on Facebook is that what Facebook calls a
"like" is not a rating, it is actually a connection.

They are building a network graph, and the opposite of a connection is not-a-
connection, which is the default state.

There's nothing "lower" or "worse" than the absence of a connection. This is
sort of like the old joke that the opposite of love is not hate, it's
indifference.

------
6d0debc071
I wonder:

Whether dislikes, especially from an unknown walk-by, have a stronger
emotional effect than likes. (And whether this varies by gender and anonymity
of the attacker.)

What subset of posts tend to attract dislikes. (I could easily see questions
and things like that attracting dislikes because they don't add general
utility and then one dickhead comes by and decides to spit on someone for
being ignorant/learning.)

Whether when people dislike something they're really just trying to make it
less visible.

#

Though, since we're really talking about something's size in the search space,
if people just ignore it it has more or less the same practical effect as it
getting downvoted. Which makes the fact that something can get posted early in
the day and be missed, and then be posted later by someone else and be seen
kinda ironic.

I don't know, I've long thought that rating systems done on a per-post basis
are really bad for promoting positive content. You don't get to customise it
to show each user what they want, you don't get to cache any of your work
really - and there seems to be something wrong with it, at least based on back
of the hand personal eye-balling, that seems to make it wreck communities
(i.e. since it's been becoming popular I've found less value in online
discussion.)

