Twitter is the worst with this as it ONLY has a heart. Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is no way to show another emotion and it desperately needs something like this, similar to Facebook.
And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree.
I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.
The like button isn't for saving things. It's for liking them. If you want to save a tweet, Twitter has both Bookmarks and Stories you can use to file it away. If you're liking tweets to save them for later, you're just using Twitter incorrectly.
And a "Disagree" button is just a terrible idea. It immediately invites conflict into every post. Imagine writing a post about your experiences with sexual assault or something and you start getting Disagrees from people...
If social media feels like it's limiting your social expression, you might want to step away from social media.
I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments.
Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote.
Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community.
However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble.
I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that
a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality.
b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform.
c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out.
d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote.
And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.
> There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?
For others, maybe not, but for the downvote-ees, I think that they can. There's a tendency to bridle at a downvote, but I know that, especially in my early days here, downvotes were very helpful for figuring out what posts were appropriate and welcome in this community. The downvotes were an unobtrusive way for me to get the message without a huge thread in which many people individually would have been forced to make exactly the same point.
(I do notice that, in contentious discussions, downvotes are often used to express disagreement, rather than the idea that a post is not a valuable contribution, and I think that's a shame.)
And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree.
I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.