Report Blog Entry
Let's talk about signal to noise in modern social media. With the advent of "likes", it offered a low effort reach into your dopamine system. Like a drug, it leaves you craving more but offers little return in the form of serotonin aka. Happiness.
Utilizing a platform without likes greatly helps regulate your relationship to the platform and humanizes the interaction 10 fold. A like is only a single "bit" of information while a comment offers much greater feedback into your meat head. It's not some dumb ass metric of numbers and little red notification bubbles, it's the written word and being so, uses the less primitive part of your brain. I would even bet, that leaving a like is almost as dehumanizing as getting one.
Hope everyone is doing great and looking forward to the evolution of this platform!
Comments
Displaying 2 of 2 comments ( View all | Add Comment )
clive
I really agree -- the quantification of attention really messes with people's heads.
I believe Instagram turned off "like" counts a while back; you can see your own numbers, but you can't see other people's "like" counts. I wonder if it's had any noticeable effect yet on user behavior?
alex
Fully agree! I think this point and similar ones are resonating with a lot of people here, and I'm personally really excited about what it all means. Deep down we've all known it for a long time but with SpaceHey we somehow got to experience what it really meant, and it's incredibly refreshing!