Proposal: if you’re a social media or other content based platform, add a long-press to the “share” button which allows you to choose between “hate share” and “love share”.
Therefore: * quick tap: keep the current functionality, you get to send the link wherever / copy to clipboard * long press and swipe to either hate or love share: you still get to send the link (optionally, the URL has some argument indicating it’s a hate / love share, if the link is a redirect through the social media platform)
This would allow users to separate out between things that are worth sharing but that they hate / love and want to see less / more of, and it might defang the currently powerful strategy (with massive negative social externalities) of generating outrage content just to get more shares.
Social media companies can, in turn, then use this to dial back the viraility of hate share vs love share content, if they choose to do so.
I believe that there is already far too much “hate sharing”.
Perhaps the default in a social media UI should be that shared content includes a public endorsement of whatever content it links to, and if you want to “hate share” anything without such an endorsement, you have to fight a hostile UI to do so.
In particular, “things that are worth sharing” absolutely should not overlap with “want to see less of”. If you want to see less of some type of thing, it’s self-defeating to distribute more copies of it. Worse, if you even suspect that any of your own readers are anything like you, why are you inflicting it on them?
One way to “see less of” something you hate is to stop it from being produced, and that may be seen as a better solution than basically averting your eyes from it. Rallying mobs to get whoever produced it fired has proven to be quite effective.
Proposal: if you’re a social media or other content based platform, add a long-press to the “share” button which allows you to choose between “hate share” and “love share”.
Therefore:
* quick tap: keep the current functionality, you get to send the link wherever / copy to clipboard
* long press and swipe to either hate or love share: you still get to send the link (optionally, the URL has some argument indicating it’s a hate / love share, if the link is a redirect through the social media platform)
This would allow users to separate out between things that are worth sharing but that they hate / love and want to see less / more of, and it might defang the currently powerful strategy (with massive negative social externalities) of generating outrage content just to get more shares.
Social media companies can, in turn, then use this to dial back the viraility of hate share vs love share content, if they choose to do so.
I believe that there is already far too much “hate sharing”.
Perhaps the default in a social media UI should be that shared content includes a public endorsement of whatever content it links to, and if you want to “hate share” anything without such an endorsement, you have to fight a hostile UI to do so.
In particular, “things that are worth sharing” absolutely should not overlap with “want to see less of”. If you want to see less of some type of thing, it’s self-defeating to distribute more copies of it. Worse, if you even suspect that any of your own readers are anything like you, why are you inflicting it on them?
One way to “see less of” something you hate is to stop it from being produced, and that may be seen as a better solution than basically averting your eyes from it. Rallying mobs to get whoever produced it fired has proven to be quite effective.