can you please add commenting and stars and heart for snap! like scratch?
Are we thinking of the same book? I remember not finding any details referring to addiction or evil popularity contests in it. What her book did tell was a poignant story about how Facebook's "Like"-button used to be (and perhaps still is, I don't know) a decoy for actual, literal surveillance of those who clicked it, by means of third party cookies.
But the reason it works as a surveillance technique is that it's so omnipresent on the web, because they taught everyone to need the constant reinforcement.
That's also why the developers of CoCo choose to have "no individual profiles, no likes, no followers, no units of comparison. Just a peaceful place for — being. creative. together."
What you can do if you like a project is send one of the following private stickers. They are only visible to the user receiving them.
I do think there are great reasons why we absolutely should embrace non-free-text interactions and feedback among Snap! users:
- Inclusion: It works across spoken languages and empowers non-English native speakers by letting them interact with others
- Accessibility: It lowers the threshold for communication - even if rudimentary - by not requiring users to type or use text to speech, kinda like what blocks do to code syntax
- Moderation: It takes little to no moderation effort, because we have control over which forms of feedback or interaction we consider to be appropriate
Sure, there are downsides to any form of feedback, and I certainly wouldn't want popularity contests among users. But there are ways to curb those, e.g.
- Don't show "likes", "hearts", "stars" publicly, but only to the addresse / author of the project
- Don't publish collections of "most liked" or "what the community is remixing" publicly / anywhere
- Be / stay very careful about which projects we show in public collections, so as to not favor certain users
Personally, I think it's a shame that we don't have democratic, inclusive, accessible and moderation-friendly low-threshold ways to let users non-verbally give feedback and encourage each other on this site. And I believe that it's all for the wrong reasons. That book that keeps getting mentioned criticizes platform capitalism which is completely different from the Snap! community both in motive and execution.
I like reactions, I use them all the time on discord and services where they're implemented, because usually someone has made my point in a much better way.
The problem with citing that book (Which, to be fair, I haven't read) is that it's citing facebook, Which, has the right data but draws the wrong conclusion.
Which is to say, it's not that likes are used to violate privacy but it's FACEBOOK that used a technique to violate privacy, and they are quite notorious for doing that anyway, like the time it came out that while profiles could have other genders, they were tagging those as null, meaning they were not searchable, that doesn't mean that being inclusive is bad, it means FACEBOOK is bad.
Yes there are pro/con scenarios no matter what gets implemented, but as long as you're implementing something for the right reasons?
There are plenty of open source icon packs that you could use.
"reactions" was the vocabulary I was lacking, thank you!
Facebook's motivation was and is to violate your privacy by profiling you, by knowing about every time you click on anything anywhere.
But Facebook's effect was also to train users to need stamps of approval in order to feel they've done something worthwhile. I confess, I heart things on Patreon because (a) I don't always have the energy to write a paragraph about what I particularly liked about something, and (b) I have the feeling that a few of the creators I patronize are insecure enough to need that content-free affirmation.
I confess, I heart things on Patreon because (a) I don't always have the energy to write a paragraph about what I particularly liked about something
Yeah, that's also why I do it.
I confess, I heart things on Patreon because (a) I don't always have the energy to write a paragraph about what I particularly liked about something
Absolutely not. Mod Points, Upvoting, reactions predate facebook by a magnitude of years, facebook popularised it, and did it in bad faith to track you, sure, but reactions are not a new thing. The mistake you're making is conflating a conversationial technique with the company that did it in bad faith.
Writing off a whole other branch of communication because one group did it badly...
Whether or not other people used related technology before Facebook misses my point, which is that Facebook has trained its users, which is to say everyone except me :~), to need hearts on their posts to feel validated -- to feel loved, in effect.
That's not entirely true, since many young people haven't used facebook, and haven't fallen into the trap of needing likes. However, I cannot say that is entirely true, because many young people still crave likes (just look at scratch), even though they haven't used facebook.
I think it's not just facebook's problem, it's just the psychology behind likes in general. I think reactions would be better, since it's not a dedicated "like" button, but instead multiple reactions that may or may not show on the project.
as do i (i'm pretty sure i've used the star reaction thousands of times, mostly in the omniarchive server)
No, of course, that part was hyperbole. But I'm old enough to remember the pre-Facebook net, and they really are the people who trained everyone to lust after likes, even non-Facebook users, because they trained people to copy-paste Facebook like buttons into their own web pages (thereby collecting data even on people who don't use Facebook but who ever once click one of those like buttons, thereby installing spyware into your browser).
But I'm old enough to remember the pre-Facebook net,
So am I, and I was a teen in that era. I can absolutely tell you that likes and reactions predate facebook by atleast five years, possibly ten years. I know this because I used sites that had the features well before facebook went public.
It's easy to blame facebook because they brought it to the public's attention in a wide way, but also remember people only realised that MUCH later, much much later than Facebook's public release.
Facebook did the wrong thing, and it's very important to highlight that, but it's also crucial to understand that likes and reactions existed long before facebook did. You can't write off a thing because one company did it in bad faith.
I love using hearts and thumbs ups and the 100% reacts personally, and a few custom emotes here and there. Also, I like using chained reactions too, I like using four or five reactions to continue the thread without saying anything!
But it means something different now. Meanings change. It's like, I dunno, weird example, but there was a time when white entertainers could sing in blackface and yeah, if you looked hard you could probably tease out a racist context even then, but today it's just a flat out racist attack. I bet Al Jolson really imagined he was paying tribute to black singers. And, imho, today there's nothing good about likes, and that's mainly because of FB.
Oh I'm well aware of blackface, in Australia we had a a televised incident of it, recently... and by recently I mean THIS CENTURY, and while it's been roughly a decade??? If you were to ask privately, a lot of Australians wouldn't understand what the fuss was. Which is a frustrating shame.
Things do change, but sometimes they don't. In spite of Facebooks antics, thousands of sites implement reactions, is there a chance that some of them are doing underhanded things? Absolutely. The probability of that is extremely high, but no-one's found them yet.
The problem is though, in this particular case, the only evidence that currently exists is Facebook, so you're not defending a strong position, you're going back to the same scenario every time, and as Facebook have made abundantly clear over the last few years, the difference between what they say they're doing and what they're doing is VAST. Bad Faith is a problem.
You can't dismiss a technology because one company refuses to be honest. That's not fair to ANYONE else.
Well, you don't have the same shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow that we do. (You do share our shameful history about attacking the indigenous population of the country, I know.) And we still, this century, have you know, fraternity boys who don't get it.
You're still missing my point. I'm not accusing anyone else of bad faith, least of all the kids who keep asking (I mean, a different kid each time, not one insistent one) for likes on Snap!. What I'm saying is that because of Facebook's success, Internet users today have learned to have what I consider an addictive relationship with likes, and that that cheapens the tone of discussion on every site that uses them, regardless of the intentions of the people who run those sites.
It's two separate but linked issues: One is how Facebook, specifically, promoted likes for truly evil reasons. The other is that, as a result, they've trained everyone to feel that the point of participating in a conversation is to get other people to stroke them. It doesn't matter if you get that like because you're helping your community grow in understanding or because you said something snarky that puts someone else down.
Non-FB site builders who naively do what everyone else does by promoting likes (and hearts and stars, all that) are innocent; I'm not attacking them. But, alas, here at Snap! we have someone who used to teach Social Implications of Computers at Berkeley, and so we're not naive. We're obliged to do the right thing.
The fact that we haven't gotten around to implementing actual comments on project pages exacerbates the problem. If we were to implement likes right now, we would have only that degraded form of communication, which doesn't tell the author what you like about their work. We all know we need comments, including on users' profile pages. We just have (a) not enough staff time, and (b) more urgent problems, including building the infrastructure we need to cooperate better with schools, and including accessibility for people with visual difficulties. None of us is happy about this.