Downvotes and Dislikes: Twitter Wants to Go Global While YouTube Is Removing Dislike Count

Back in the days disliking something on the web, or plainly clicking downvote because of any reason was as natural as liking the content. However, the abuse of these “expression buttons” has become a painful spot for many social media outlets.

While some companies go with a different approach, like YouTube removing the dislike counts, Twitter recently announced that they are going global with the testing of downvoting. While the “psychology” of the internet seems to be on the test run, it does not look like it is going to back to what it was before.

Both sides of downvoting and disliking

If one were to look at the advantages, much educational content or informational commentary on both platforms needed a button to say “This is not good.” and express it to the audience before they even interact with the content. It saved time and clicks for some. However, people learned that dislikes, likes, downvotes, upvotes; all meant some form of interaction and publicity within the algorithm. It caused bad content to be produced for the mere purpose of being a “dislike hit”, or “getting intentionally downvoted to be controversial”. There are also several types of public misusage involving cyberbullying and the mental health of content creators but that is a very personal case.

It took people’s ability to express their negativity on content. While it made the abuse and cyberbullying less severe, it also took one outlet of interaction from the platform. A huge portion of people is still thinking about what is the point of a button if they do not see what they are clicking for. Well, at least it might solve the problem with the new kind of content creation revolving around the idea of “Any publicity is good publicity.” But the algorithms might need to be tweaked a little as well.

The future plans

YouTube made the counts private, but it was still shown to the creator. Twitter downvoting is planned to be a similar practice with downvoting being there but shown to the author and the optimizing algorithm. While these plans seem to be on the run right now, it must be mentioned that there are other takes on this new solution as well. Some claim that with the disappearance of the counts, people will not see the results of their expression and the counts for both buttons will just diminish. Some say that it will reduce people who will dislike the video and just make the statistics weird to use for the creator.

Only time will tell, but the times when the internet was actually a free place to express yourself without any concern seem to be long gone. A lot of regulatory action is happening on the web nowadays (Read: Google Blocks Advertisement Targeting for People Under 18) and I am pretty sure this news will not be the only one.

Of course, regulations are not a bad thing; however, social media outlets without negative feedback and only rainbowlike positivity sound a little bit too artificial.