Downvoting has its uses, and with ssb being so decentralized, downvoting would eventually arise. However I'd recommend framing it as not the opposite of upvoting, and not side by side with liking. Downvoting is more useful for flagging a comment as unnecessary and harmful. So it should look like a report or flag button. If it's symmetrical to 'like', it may look like the use case for disagreeing with an unharmful and valid argument.

I'm not sure about this.

One thing, is this feels like an escalating gesture, i.e. communicate anger. The trouble with anger is that it's contagious. Quite often the recipient just gets angry back, and so it makes the situation worse. What we want, is to make the situation better

patchwork@2 had flags, and they came in 2 flavors. "abusive" or "spam". This was also escalating, "abuse" is a very strong word, and this meant that someone got flagged as abuse but really didn't feel like he was being abusive. where as he could have hardly denied being "annoying". Another time, @johnny was writing a bot, but it had a few bugs, and these extra posts where flagged as "spam", but that was hurtful, because "spam" is intentional, but it was just an accident. maybe flagging as "oops" would have been better.

I'd lean towards communicating sadness instead of anger. There is lots of ways a sad button could be used. If you loose your kitten - definitely sad. But sometimes you do something, and later it makes you sad. Maybe you said something unkind, or maybe what you tried to say didn't land right. You can still apologise for things you didn't intend to do. I think the world would be a better place if people said "sorry" a bit more often. So, you could click sorry on your own message if you regretted it.

hmm: is there a lot more nuance in the ways we express negative emotions than positive ones?

I really like lynn cyrin's thoughts here, http://lynncyrin.me/2016/06/13/social-combat-rules-of-engagement/ on balanced responses to social problems. Also of interest is the distinction between intergroup and intragroup conflicts.

@jolyon I enjoyed your comment, but it's not clear what you are proposing. Also, you are giving me too much credit, we would have never gotten this far without the efforts of many people. The people who wrote code is pretty obvious, but also like @mikey who lead a lot of effort to do community support like documentation! And everyone one who has been active in the fledgling community because they made it worthwhile to continue working on this!

@Howard Klein I agree, I think mute is the best first step.

@jolyon @Zach! lets discuss renaming the "like" button in another thread so this one doesn't go completely off the rails.

@robin.paulson i agree with you, but i think it's important to recognize the law of the internet.

• 90% of people only consume content
• 9% of people will do a lightweight interaction (vote)
• 1% of people will do a heavyweight interaction (comment)

i find this even applies in consciously active groups like Enspiral, although with maybe slightly different ratios.

reference: 1% rule (Internet culture)

great points here @robin.paulson If we had "repost/retweet" feature implemented, I would use it here.

but, just to be contrary:
In a way, ideas do degrade - because they loose their novelty. Is there anything more exciting than a new idea? When you learn of a new idea, you get the reward for passing it on. A joke is only funny the first time you hear it. Is this sense, there is a consumable value in ideas, but it is in their velocity, their rate of flow, not in their simple presense. see alexander bard - netocracy for some more juicy ideas like this.

This thread spawned a number of great discussions, but one thing is missing: the original authors didn't explain why they thought it was a worthwhile experiment / possibly a good idea.

Incidentially, my own thoughts on this have completely changed since this was posted, but I'd like to hear from @mikey and @Piet