While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you stop using Facebook.
Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair: it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.) Facebook is not unaware of social patterns like this, so they make product choices which make them less likely to negatively affect Facebook's interests.
Here's an interesting social networking concept: the mixture of real names with anonymity. Your name would appear if you "liked" something, but dislikes would be anonymous. You could also have the option to post comments anonymously. Of course, bullying and drama would certainly be more prevalent, but nonetheless, it'd be an interesting experiment. (I also think people would be less afraid to speak their mind when a friend posts something incredibly stupid.)
To continue your thought experiment, I imagine that if it allowed plugins or extensions of some sort (like facebook apps), somebody would inevitably write a machine learning algorithm that attempts to deduce who (out of a given set of people) wrote an anonymous comment.
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While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you stop using Facebook.
Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair: it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.) Facebook is not unaware of social patterns like this, so they make product choices which make them less likely to negatively affect Facebook's interests.
> for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.
I didn't realise this until my sister told me recently that I was "getting pretty good at Facebook".
Upvoted, you're getting pretty good at Hacker News.
Here's an interesting social networking concept: the mixture of real names with anonymity. Your name would appear if you "liked" something, but dislikes would be anonymous. You could also have the option to post comments anonymously. Of course, bullying and drama would certainly be more prevalent, but nonetheless, it'd be an interesting experiment. (I also think people would be less afraid to speak their mind when a friend posts something incredibly stupid.)
To continue your thought experiment, I imagine that if it allowed plugins or extensions of some sort (like facebook apps), somebody would inevitably write a machine learning algorithm that attempts to deduce who (out of a given set of people) wrote an anonymous comment.