this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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This kind of information is all suppressed now, but early on when Facebook only had likes, there was a lot of discussion on how downvotes weren't really needed. It was believed that people engaged more with content they enjoyed, and ignored unfavorable content.
This is wildly wrong. People obsessively engage with content they hate, to the extent that it probably makes more sense to only have a down vote button. Everyone knows that now, and the big sites uses psychological studies funded by casinos to gamify engagement, entirely in the pursuit of click-pennies.
What do votes mean? On lemmy it seems nothing. On other sites they mean revenue for the owners.
Except youtube, because dislikes were only used to call out scams and ads. The ad people got mad and now misinformation is easier to spread.
I wouldn’t say ‘only’. There were a lot of downvoted things that were just controversial.
Yes, there were, and for the most part YT promoted those dislikes the same as likes. I think they still do. The dislikes they actually removed were the visible ones, the ones people could use to steer clear of ads and scams.
I have never cared for human nature. It's tedious at best and often ghastly. We should all concern ourselves much more with human nurture.
To put it plainly, we should not be letting corporations do research on how to manipulate our most base instincts on social media. That would have been a moderate solution a century ago. Now we would need a more radical approach, such as outlawing most forms of advertising content and social media manipulation. And even raising the topic probably makes me sound insane.