Who Likes The Likers

There’s a new social hub in Geminispace today at, appropriately enough, geminispace.org.

It’s called Bubble, and it looks great: simple, minimal, and enough people have been trying it out that there’s a chance it will fly.

Here are my two cents.

Feature Request: Thanks, Not Likes

I recently wrote a draft post about saying “thanks” in Geminispace. The launch of Bubble makes it suddenly topical, so I’ll just “post” it now by linking the draft here:

I Want To Say Thank You

In it I mostly write about why I think a low-barrier-to-entry feedback mechanism is important for Gemini, then briefly mention why I think “thanks” is the right action and “like” is not.

What I mean by “thanks” vs “likes” is that “thanks” are a private message to the post author, while “likes” are public and might be used for filtering/discovering content.

I see that Bubble has a “likes” mechanism, so I’d like—hah—to expand on that theme a little.

Interaction Reward And Bubbling To The Top

The web is full of “likes” mechanisms, so there must be something good about them.

Actually, that’s not true at all. The world is full of viruses but there is little to recommend them. In fact, to be correct: the web is full of “likes” mechanisms, so there must be something self-perpetuating about them.

I think I see what: hitting the “like” button gives an instant reward; it simultaneously makes you part of a group, the likers, and boosts the prominence of the group. As social animals we’re built to want exactly this. People directly enjoy it and so any site offering likes is ... more well liked.

The secondary effect of likes is around content discovery. It makes the posts that attract attention, more visible. Attracting attention is a proxy for quality—and not a bad one—but not a great one, either.

So the tertiary effect of likes is that it incentivizes writing a certain type of post: attention-grabbing headlines, just-about-controversial-enough content.

The longer such a system runs the more particular patterns get entrenched; once there is a sufficiently large crowd that always votes in the same way it’s very hard for a newcomer to get established. So the quaternany effect of likes is to subdue the small.

Keeping The Good Parts

And so my proposal—and let me be first to acknowledge, this is pure speculation—is to keep the good parts of “likes” and chuck the bad parts.

Giving people a button that says “thanks” is great—in fact I think it’s very important indeed.

Relaying those thanks to the author is obviously necessary.

Publishing them automatically is where I draw the line; I suggest not doing this. Moreso, it should be strongly discouraged to publish them manually in any form, just as you would not include a list or count of the private thanks you had received for a post by email.

This leaves two problems that need solving in a different way.

First, content discovery. Here, I want something “flat”, something that doesn’t end up biased towards the current group think. Actually, what I want is much like how independent capsules work: I notice a new capsule, then I decide to subscribe to it or not.

On a social hub this means a few features: a way to subscribe to posts from another user; a way to hide them; and a way to discover new users whom I have not yet decided whether to subscribe to or to hide. I guess Bubble mostly works like this already if you don’t sort by “hotness”.

Second, interaction reward; it would be great to keep the social animal good vibes we get from hitting a “like” button. How about displaying a site-wide activity counter? “Activity today: 10 posts, 5 comments, 45 thanks." That way hitting “thanks” does provide an interaction that makes you part of a group; but the group is the whole site, and the mark you leave is ephemeral. The incentive, if there is one, is for everyone to make the site as a whole successful.

Whatever Works

Finally, thanks to skyjake for building and launching Bubble, and good luck with it! Most of all what Gemini needs is for people to invest time and effort. Thank you. Please take my feedback for what it is—merely idle musings of a Gemlogger.

I’m enjoying posting on my own capsule but I’m not entirely convinced about interleaving original posts with replies to other posts, it seems a bit awkward; one way I might end up using Bubble would be to move the replies there.

I just now stumbled upon this post from dzwdz which has some orthogonal suggestions for chucking the bad parts of social media while keeping the good:

feeds are a dark pattern

Summarized: surface the small, downplay the addictive.

Feedback 📮

So far today, 2024-11-25, feedback has been received 245 times. Of these, 51 were likely from bots, and 194 might have been from real people. Thank you, maybe-real people!