like – Pertinent Observations

When you read histories or profiles of Facebook (the “original” product), there are two inflexion points that are likely to get mentioned. One is the news feed, where updates from all your friends are shown in “random” order on your wall (along with a bunch of ads). The other is the “like” button.

The like button was transformative in that it allowed people to express their acknowledgement of a post without really having to write a word. It was the lazy person’s best friend. One bit to show that they have “put attendance” or “shown support” or just acknowledged that they had been there.

More importantly, from Facebook’s perspective, this gave them tremendous data (at low cost to the users) in terms of what people wanted to see more or less of on their newsfeeds. Their algorithms quickly started working on this, and people’s feeds got tuned. Engagement went up. Ad sales went up. Everything was good.

And then the like button started appearing everywhere. I remember Twitter changing one button – from something else to “like”. LinkedIn introduced it, too. Soon, there were several versions of the like button representing different kinds of emotions. I don’t even understand what most of these buttons mean.

It was only a matter of time that this button would make its way to WhatsApp. It’s been there for a few years now but I haven’t really taken to using it. And now I’m thinking it’s actually a problem.

The problem with the like button (or any other such emojis) on WhatsApp is that it is a conversation stopper. Literally. It is basically a message that cannot be replied to, or acknowledged (you can’t like a like). So once one of the parties puts the emoji, there is nothing more to be done, but to move on.

Long ago, conversations would go like this:

“Hey man, happy birthday”.
“Thanks a lot. how are you doing? how’s the job / wife / kid? ”
Conversation continues….

“Hey, check out this link”
Either no response, or “Thanks, I’ll check it out”, or (best case) “Very very interesting. This is my take on this. And see this other article”

Now all this is history. You say Happy Birthday, and people react right there with some emoji. You send them a link. They react with a thumbs up sign on the same message. There is nothing else to do. There is no conversation.

I’ve started regarding the like emoji on WhatsApp as rude (the only exception is the laughing emoji, to react to jokes, and that is ONLY to be used in groups). If someone reacts with an emoji (especially the thumbs up, or folded hands), I take that as “ok fine, I don’t want to talk to you” sign.

Maybe I’m becoming old.

There is a good friend of mine who is a compulsive “LinkedIn liker”. Anything anyone in his network writes (either a LinkedIn blog or a status update or a job announcement), he is extremely likely to “like” them. While that helps the authors of such updates in getting their messages across to this guy’s networks also, the thing is that such likes add little value. If an update has come on my timeline because this guy has liked it, I’ll take it with salt since I know that this guy’s likes are “cheap”.

I don’t want to single out this guy, but there are several others on my Facebook friend list who are also compulsive likers. They like just about everything that they see, but the Facebook algorithm (by which not all of your updates are shared with all of your friends) means that their incidence is less than that of the LinkedIn liker. Then I have this one follower on Twitter who unfailingly likes each tweet of mine with a link. He engages in conversation very very sporadically, but like he does all the time!

So this got me thinking on the value of people’s likes, and what would happen if likes were to be rationed. I know it’s going to be hard to implement, but if you wee told that you had a quota of 10 likes that you could dole out in a day, how would you then ration your likes? Would such a cap make likes more valuable?

The reason this matters is that the number of likes has now become a metric that social media marketers track, and if some people’s likes are less valuable than others’, it is essentially a useless metric (and I know the problem is with the metric, not with likes). Even otherwise, from an information perspective, knowing the value of each person’s likes is useful for you in making up your mind on something!

So if say facebook decides that you get 10 free likes a day and have to pay for any more, how does that change your liking behaviour? For your 11th like, will you pay or go unlike something you’ve already liked? As a thought experiment, it is fascinating!

And while we are discussing Facebook, I must mention that I absolutely loathe its algorithm. I don’t know how it works, but it seems to me that the better updates that I put there just never get carried to my network, but some random updates that I sometimes put get propagated like crazy. I’ve been trying to reduce the number of updates there so that each update has a greater probability of getting propagated, but it just doesn’t seem to help!

And I was thinking about Facebook’s algorithm, and Twitter’s non-algorithm where every tweet you put gets carried to all your followers. Since Twitter doesn’t filter, all your followers have an opportunity to see all that you say. But the problem there is that since your followers see tweets of everyone on their timelines, your tweet is likely to get lost in the competition for attention.

So basically Twitter is like a free market where you have everyone’s tweets that get shown and compete for a follower’s attention. Facebook is like a more regulated market where there is no clutter, so every update gets undivided attention, but there is a Big Brother which decides who should see what!

I wonder if Facebook has considered making its algorithm public, and if it does, if it will have any impact on how people share. The value it will have for me is that at least I will know whether an update will get carried or not, and time and space my updates properly. But considering that one of Facebook’s revenue sources is to be paid by users to propagate their updates further, revelation of the algorithm will result in lower revenues for Facebook, so they’ll never do that.

I might just get all disgusted with the algorithm and quit Facebook some day.