I've been hit by two negative incidents as a direct result of social networking "likes" being spread around -- incidents I had to apologize for, multiple times in one case. So you can imagine my concern when I fired up my Tumblr mobile app to discover my username as a footnote on a friend's lewd art I hit Like on for its technical quality and for no other reason.
Does anyone actually find features like these useful? Because for me, it just makes it feel awkward to support my friends.🔸️
@Lobst All communication carries the risk of miscommunication. The scale of miscommunication is relative to the connotative gap between parties, and generally inverse with the simplicity of the medium. Your likes don't mean what my likes mean. My likes today won't mean what my likes tomorrow mean. Functionally, "likes" are meaningless because of their deliberate ambiguity, but we're implicitly encouraged to assume they carry a consistent communicable value. I don't like them.
...My first impulse was to 'like' both of these posts, which... just goes to show. ;)
Sympathies for you Lobst, this is indeed a scary problem (being in the midst of a (different sort of) whirlwind of social media miscommunication myself at the moment, I really feel for you) and hearty agreement with buni's assessment and frustration.
@indi @Lobst Generally speaking, I understand "like" to be "non-specific noise of support of you as a person to have produced this thing." In a social media landscape as dominated by gamified systems as we've all come to expect, and with as limited a set of tools as we have to express ourselves in that space, it's about the best I'm going to get, and I've learned to stop worrying and love the Like. I can still dream of better interfaces, but I'll take what I can get in the interim. :)
@literorrery Perhaps distressingly, at least in stopped-clock terms, I think it is The BookFace which now has different flavors of reaction-clicks and of course Slack and Discord open it up to the whole emoji-set which... helps some of that... and introduces a whole set of new problems. 9.9
@indi What I really want, and may one day design if never implement, is a three-tier system of posting, tagging posts, and concurring/disagreeing with the tags others have left. And then filtering systems set up over who has permission to leave what tags, or respond to what tags. It all looks very complicated and makes parts of my systems-driven head very happy, all while terrifying Elbey staring at this nightmare of data tracking and weeping into his paws.