Like functionality

Hey @rasmusfuhse I appreciate the irony of you liking my post saying how much I hate ‘likes’! :slight_smile:

Liking is a kind of contradiction. That’s what I’ve always said.

I agree with the opinions here about likes being a marketing tool and not actually useful for human communication.

I was talking about removing them long time ago in D*, should have come here earlier… I thought I was alone :slight_smile:

One thing I want to add to the discussion: I don’t think a huge stream of “I like it” or “Cool” would be bad. I would actually make people question the robotic way Faceb00k/G00gle made them communicate, and realize how absurd and actually useless that feature is.

If this move is communicated well and publicly annouced, people could understand. You could start by annoucing the idea on the pods and asking people to come here and express a serious opinion - or at least talk in D* - and then you’d know better what people think.

Remember people can always just type the word “Like” and press enter - you can even make a shortcut button for it - would still be a comment, still make people feel it’s weird and question the use of Likes.

I think that the Like function is one of those standards created by facebook that people expect to see in social networking. While some people may like the idea of getting rid of it, the average person (I assume we’d like a larger percent of the population) would just see it as one more thing that FB has that D* doesn’t. And if you give them a philosophical reason for it, that will only serve as a further turn-off, as most people don’t want to get involved on a philosophical level with the technology they’re using. It’s one of the reasons that many people hesitate to use free software; it feels like a philosophical commitment. A product that operates under a philosophy but markets itself as a product can do well, but a product that operates under a philosophy and markets itself as a movement is off-putting and gives off cult vibes. I think it’d be great if Linux and it’s many distros would learn this lesson.

@d351mims
It’s true that many people, maybe most, value convenience above freedom, sharing and privacy. But if the Like button remains for the reasons you mentioned, we’ll be supporting this situation instead of helping change it.

Do you really think people can’t do better than just use what’s fastest, easiest and shiniest?

It’s not exact science, but I believe humans can be better than this. If you teach them step by step, they will learn and open their mind and change the way they make decisions and use services.

Diaspora* is about openness and freedom. There is no competition, because D* is not about money or popularity. Having users who just expect an FB clone defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it? Making convenience the top priority would make D* just another social network.

Due to the fact D* is not committed legally or commercially to anything and anyone, it has a huge power Faceb00k and G00gle don’t - it can experiment, innovate and even collaborate with its own users openly. If there’s no good reason in terms of functionality to have the Like button but there are views against it - let’s at least run a pilot on one pod and gather feedback.

“What people expect” is how greedy companies make decisions. D* is not like that :slight_smile:

I thought that the entire point of software was convenience. Otherwise, we could just write our friends a mass email, or better yet a letter, rather than have social networking sites in the first place. Why make the experience of moving people to a place where their privacy is kept more in their control more jarring than it need be? What is there to be gained from getting rid of this feature? Sure, try it on a trial pod. I just don’t think your ideals will provide the mass adoption necessary to make a social network successful. Business or not, if we want people to move to a safer and wiser option, it has to have some level of appeal beyond telling the user that you’d rather change their expectations than create something that meets those expectations. The user is weighing the gains for their privacy and control against the inconvenience of switching to a site that doesn’t have all of their friends on it already and lacks many of the features they’re used to. Diaspora* is not in a position to change those expectations, as it lacks the kind of following required to establish a new set of norms.

The point of software is not convenience, but the ability to solve problems faster, especially in the sense of reducing order of growth. For example, sending a mass email takes the user O(1) time with a mouse click but O(n) when writing n copies of the same physical letter.

I also think success is not defined by how many users you have, but how well your software solves the functional problems. However, to me the idea of what kind of society I’d like to see on this planet is more important than any convenience and any features. But that’s just me.

Recognizing many people would miss the button, I suggest the button is removed on a trial pod with a proper announcement.

I have an answer to your question: The experience people have moving here should first of all free them and create a new environment where their privacy is above someone’s profit. If they just want the convenience, why even try to lure them with Like buttons? If it succeeds and D* becomes popular with this kind of thinking, it will be filled with faceb00k addicted users who want to see a faceb00k clone.

I think at some point the button should be removed anyway, because of all the points people mentioned and the robotic lonely-behind-the-keyboard way it makes people “communicate”. And removing it early is better, before you have tons of users like faceb00k has.

Does anyone else think it’s worth trying on one pod to get the feeling?

Hm, I’m trying to see this from a social outside of computer point of view. When people are communicating in smaller groups, the [comment] like functionality functions like the small sounds we actually do to express that we agree, something like “uh-huh” or “mh” (this is really hard to explain in english :wink: In a discussion they’re not really that important, the comments talks for themselves.

Post-likes have another purpose though. I think of them as applauses. If a musician that has performed a song gets feedback from each one in the audience individually one after another, it would take a lot of time to find out all the opinions. Most would just say “nice played”, at least after the fifth or sixth song. That’s why applauses are convenient, people can show their appreciation and still come by and comment afterwards if they found something interesting.

I agree that the “hunt” for likes that can be seen on facebook/diaspora is sad, and it would be cool to switch our thinking so that people focus less on numbers and more on communicating, but likes still play a social role.