Discussion
Thanks to everyone who replied.
I am a Yes, but. I think downvote/dislike buttons are a great distributed moderation tool. Many of the microaggressions (and not-so-micro aggressions) that make social networks difficult could be helped a lot by peer moderation.
The "but" is that it is hard to implement well, and hard to ensure that mobs don't silence important but unpopular voices.
@evan That's why you should consider the opinion of those you trust, not just anyone. Maybe
@evan I'm not sure I even think the like button is good. I use it because of social pressure. Afaik, it mainly exists to drive engagement and is a tool for social media companies to keep you on platform and surface content that drives engagement. My favorite thing about fedi is that no one is engineering the platform to keep me here instead of living my damn life.
@evan I think there is a required level of common understanding needed to really have like/dislike, upvote/downvote, or agree/disagree be usable without being abused - it doesn't translate well across online sub-cultures without some careful UX thinking and knowing your user community.
It works on Ravelry, which uses "Agree/Disagree" but there are two essentials there that I have not seen anywhere else: /con't
1) Common context and language - there are 11 or so million users but we all knit or at least do some kind of yarn crafting.
2) Individual users and group administrators can selectively enable/disable these "click to comment generically" shorthands - so if a group moderator doesn't want Disagree whining in their group, they turn it off; if an individual user doesn't want to be bothered by seeing these, they can hide them.
Also, Ravelry has 6 of these for nuance:
Oh, I suppose a third reason these work well in the specific Ravelry community is that it is actively and collaboratively moderated and has a very simple but well laid out Code of Conduct. And a longstanding culture of everyone there being on board with a clear understanding of what those buttons mean - "Disagree" is to be taken as referring to the objective content of a post, such as "the BEST way to knit is Continental" being something one can disagree with.
@evan It's very hard to be an asshole on Ravelry because the other 10,999,999 users either won't acknowledge your existence, or if you're forcing them to do so, they will not only put you in the corner with no privileges, but they will likely find your mother, your grandmother and every auntie who ever taught you a thing about knitting and they will get you flat-out grounded or beaten with a flipflop until you smarten up.
Knitters should be consulted for any community management plan, srsly.
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