With upvotes only, you can have a BLM community and a Proud Boys community and the negative interactions are replies, which Twitter interprets as positive interactions. With downvotes you have the prospect of entire communities downvoting each other. This will probably result in one or both communities leaving.
Social design is hard, is what I’m saying.
In the Netherlands and Germany however we are pretty blunt and can tell people if we don't like something they did and they don't really take it personal if we're not an ass about it.
So for us a downvote button would be pretty normal.
They are VERY useful though if you're in advertising and want to know whether a message/opinon/subject/group/item is popular or unpopular with a target "market".
[I know you know all the above. I kind of wanted you to know that I know it too. Anyway, downvotes...]
Downvotes are massively useful in that they show what a group of people really dislike. That information is used to work out what the group don't want to see alongside of the "things" they do want to see.
Musk doesn't want censorship or fact-checking - it's irrelevant whether a message is fact or fiction, only whether it's popular or unpopular with a group. Flat-earthers buy things too.
X and YouTube etc are farming the users, the advertisers, the creators, and the employees, extracting as much from the interactions between them, and converting that into into wealth, all the while appearing to provide to each a service rather than being exposed as uncomfortably manipulative and exploitative.
Kind of beautiful in its efficiency, but quite terrible.
tl;dr? Downvote me, it's what they want :)
Downvote is inherently toxic.
They should do something useful like mandatory tags, exploration clouds and auto translations.
Twitter and X were often compared to a global town square. Imagine you hear a rumor on a town square, but decide not to spread it. You can just do that in reality. This is practically impossible with most social networks. That leads to the fact that click-bait dominates so many social networks. That is toxic in my opinion.
There is a growing number of people that seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that people might not share their opinion. This is not a sign of extremism of the others, as it is often stated, but a sign of a healthy and diverse pool of opinions. One can agree with a post and disagree, neither is bad per se or even toxic.
Errrrr..... you must have missed the "reply" button. The entirety of everything, every conversation on Twitter is people disagreeing with other people.
Hit me too. Up/down/wherever. It's up to you as the observer. The peer is right, intentional irony applies.
'We' collectively forget how to disagree because we've been conditioned to be too damn agreeable. Say something because you believe it, not because it will get updoots
So right on brand for X then.
