Sunday, May 27, 2012

The Reason why Facebook is NOT providing "Dislike" button



Many Facebook users are expecting to have "Dislike" button so that they can use this "Dislike" button if they don't like any particular content posted in Facebook. More than 3 Millions "Likes" for the Dislike button facebook page shows how people are very eager to get "Dislike" button in Facebook.

Anyway, Facebook is already having many options to report/hide the story/links which you don't like. But the Facebook users are willing to have exact "Dislike" button. I too had the question why Facebook is not providing "Dislike" button.

But recently I realized the reason why Facebook is NOT providing the "Dislike" button. It seems providing "Dislike" button will create mess-ups.





Let me explain it completely.

Last week, I had uploaded this video about the Marriage of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg with Pricilla Chan.

Immediately after uploading this video, many people clicked the "Dislike" button. Right now this video is having more "Dislikes" than the number of "Likes".

Initially I couldn't understand why this video is getting more "Dislike". So, I asked about the reason for these "Dislikes" thro' the Comments.

And, I got the answer from the replies for my comments. i-e Many people clicked the "Dislike" button in the YouTube video as they didn't like the marriage of Mark Zuckerberg with Pricilla Chan because of racism.

Now Obviously a question arises. i-e Whether the "Dislike" button in YouTube is available for signalling that the particular video is NOT Good or whether the content of the video is NOT liked by the viewer.

The other social media site "Reddit" is having equivalent of "Dislike" button (i-e Down vote". Reddit is considering the "down vote" purely as way of marking the link as spam. For example, assume that you submit a link which is telling about an excellent product release from Google. And, assume that the link is from low quality website and its way of writing is not good. If you submit this link to the "google" sub-reddit, the link will immediately get lot of "Down Votes". It doesn't mean that the Google sub-reddit users are not liking the excellent product from the Google, but it means that they were not liking the quality of the link.

Since most of the reddit users are technical users, everyone in reddit is understanding it clearly and they are using it properly. I didn't see any confusion there.

But YouTube is used by various kinds of people. We can not expect everyone to understand it properly. So, ideally YouTube should not give any importance to the number of likes and number of dislikes while setting search rank for the video. But it looks like YouTube is giving weightage for the number of "Dislikes" while deciding the search rank. i-e If the video gets more and more Dislikes then it will not appear in top of the search results for the related keywords.

And interestingly, I have noticed that more "dislikes" in particular video affects the other videos in the same channel. i-e Search rank for my other videos also got reduced. (But I am not sure whether it is purely because of this "dislike" issue).

To avoid all these mess-ups and confusions, I think Facebook is NOT providing "Dislike" button.

Still few people are expecting some kind of "Dislike" button in Facebook. i-e They were saying that it need not be a separate "dislike" button, but the ability to change the wordings of "like" into "dislike".

For example, if the user is reading a news of natural disaster in a website, right now he has to click the "like" button from the webpage if he wants to share this in his Facebook wall. But he will be hesitating to click the "like" button as the news is about the natural disaster. In this situation Facebook can allow to have the wording as "Dislike" (or something else) instead of the word "Like". Since Facebook is NOT providing this option, there may be some reason which I couldn't understand. If you know the reason you can share it thro' the comments.


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2 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

>>> Now Obviously a question arises. i-e Whether the "Dislike" button in YouTube is available for signalling that the particular video is NOT Good or whether the content of the video is NOT liked by the viewer.

The same comment is true of the "Like" button. Maybe you "like" the news in particular or you "like" hearing the news about that person or subject. Or whatever. Your comment has no rational basis.

Rajamanickam Antonimuthu said...

I agree with your comment. But the core thing is, the reason behind the "Like" is not playing any role. If you are going to watch a video with more number of Likes, you won't care about whether it is because of video quality or because of the news content. I will tend to watch the videos with more Likes irrespective of the reason behind the Likes. But in the case of the "Dislike", the reason plays an important role. I will hesitate to start watching any Videos with more "Dislikes" by assuming that the video content will be poor or fake, but people might have disliked it because of the news itself. I might have watched the video irrespective of the Dislikes if I know this fact (i-e actual reason for the Dislikes)

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