This morning in the shower I was contemplating how different online communication spaces have a very different feeling. For instance, I've had many beautiful conversations in Loomio threads, or in the Scuttlepuddle, and very few on Facebook. One way I thought about it is through the lens of context.

On Facebook you have this tremendous noisy clash of infinite different contexts. I can make a brief comment to a close friend, knowing that she and I share a lot of context. But that comment is accessible to thousands of other people with little or know knowledge of we individuals, or about our relationship. So what was sent in one context can be received in a thousand others, and in some of them it could land badly. Nek minnit, flamewar.

It's much easier to manage context at in-person gatherings. We know who is in the room, it's easy to check everyone is introduced to each other. We can bridge between different contexts with deft hosting hey there climate activist, meet my friend oil company executive. you both love playing banjo so I'm sure you've got lots to talk about!

So while I want to congratulate the foresight of the people designing the architecture of SSB to prioritise subjectivity (which helps a lot), I also want to notice that, like Loomio, probably the most important reason we're having great conversations here is because there are just not yet many different people interacting in the same space with very different intentions and backgrounds.

Also for some reason on Scuttles I don't feel like I'm in a competition to win the most social capital.

I use praise a lot in my work with training collaborative groups so I enjoy sprinkling the "likes" around on social networks. It's not about giving people quantified validation, more like, "you are great, I see you, keep going, thanks very much, go team, hooray for us!"

I've been dwelling on that a bunch lately too. You're right @Greg K Nicholson, it's not the number of "likes" that matter, I'm more interested in who they're from. And really, the "who" changes depending on the subject matter. When I write a post about sexism that get's "liked" by one feminist I really respect, that counts for more than 10 "likes" from other acquaintances. Uh oh, my overengineering brain is knocking...

This is a lovely set of observations and thoughts.

I was active and moderately popular on twitter for a few years and found that the notifications that pinged up when someone liked or RTed a post made the whole thing look and feel as addictive as a slot machine.

As a recovering alcoholic who has struggled all my life with compulsions, I find this is a very dangerous dark pattern.

There was a massive dopamine rush from making the kind of posts that work well on twitter. The feedback was immediate and on some occassions could go on for days. Then, in a pattern every addict recognises, the emptiness returns and you keep pulling the lever again and again and again hoping for another hit. More money for Jack. Less life force for me.

I have carried out various experiments with likes on twitter - building browser extensions to hide them for example.

I think, fortunately or unfortunately, they have a genuine value. A like can be a nod of acknowledgement from a friend, a reassuring hand on a shoulder, a smile, an "I want you to know that even though I have nothing more to add, I read your words". I'd argue that the majority of human communication is non-verbal so in an exclusively verbal/written environment, these gestures, like emoticons, can convey real meaning although they can also be insincere. They can serve value in discovery as well. That friend of a friend who is a bit too shy to introduce themselves might open a conversation with a like on something you said.

I prefer to use words to convey these things but sometimes a nod or a like or a smile is easier and less intrusive.

@rich do we really want to build an environment for people who play banjo? ;)

I'm joking of course (some of my best friends, etc) and your point is an excellent one. The friend of friends mechanism works really well in reducing the scope for conflict but we are all complicated beings.

I think of @mix discovering common ground with someone whose behaviour is abusive and who has been blocked by many people here as they both share experiences of fatherhood. What mix has done and is doing is wonderful. This is the work that brings people back into the fold and builds peace. Yet it also brings conflict because an abusive person brings disharmony into spaces where marginalised and oppressed people want peace and safety and many quite rightly would rather the troublemaker be banished. There's a conflict there, one that in human terms can be solved with different levels of intimacy and well demarkated spaces and one in technical terms can be solved in a similar fashion.

In my life I have friends from a broad spectrum of beliefs and lifestyles, some of whom at first glance would believe they have nothing in common or might feel habitual antagonism towards one another. SSB definitely veers towards one end of that spectrum at the moment. I am confident that it can handle greater diversity and that any technical changes needed to make that process smoother will be handled thoughtfully.

My take is that I will never block people whose values I disagree with as long as they act considerately. If they start, for example, spamming the feminism channel with antifeminist memes with the obvious goal of causing upset then I will block them without hesitation - banjo player or not.

I blocked the guy that @mixmix didn't because I had to implement block correctly and wanted to make sure that it works. (it was like half there, not enough trolls) The fact that he still seems to occasionally use ssb but I never see his posts (but sometimes I do see people talking to him) let me know it works!

@timhardy I was the same with twitter, and I weaned myself off by switching to tweetdeck, which enabled me to disable notifications about likes/retweets entirely. I really don't need real time notifications about that, maybe daily would be okay?

The goal of ssb is to build a thing where the users have some sort of say and the interface ends up optimized for their happyness and calmness not their engagement... since the data layer is strongly separated from the UI layer, I can never shut down competing UIs or own all the UIs in the ecosystem.

Agree with @rich I care more about who like/digs my post than how many.

Also, note - twitter has global notifications for replies and favs - and this is the main vector for abuse - but on ssb there are no global push notifications of any kind you can know about replies or likes from someone that is in your broader social network (depending on your replication settings)

@timhardy oh another thing you'll probably like, I'm working on %ssb-ooo which is a key social scalability feature - it will allow you to just replicate a few people, but still see the conversations your friends are having (with people they follow but you do not). It will pull in their messages (Out Of Order) but not replicate their whole feeds. It will only pull in stuff that your friends have acknowledged (theirfore, kinda of pulled in to your context)

This means that if your friend is arguing with a troll, the troll will never have the last word (from your perspective) you'll always see your friend's last reply as last. I feel this is quite poetic - but also something that just falls out of the technology, and is not explicitly designed.

I'm a big fan of the accidental poetry @dominic - at least it feels like you've built something right if it starts being poetic.

The likes thing is really interesting. One of my favourite lenses for software (or systems in general) is to ask

Are people using this system in an unintended way?
There's this tension with likes where they look ambiguous, but in some contexts they're not at all ... as in if I need to know someone read something and they like it, we're all good.

I do wonder if there are hidden patterns which could be brought to the fore here. It's often a smell when people are using a technology in ways not anticipated.

One idea could be to seperate the likes - as in show me likes based on my relationship to that person. e.g. it might be useful for Rich to see which likes were friends / collaborators, and which were from strangers.

Or perhaps you want something like a mention, but not so overt, kinda like a private meaningful look for a particular person which accompanies something you're saying more generally. (this smell currently presents only a little for me - I occassionaly privately ask someone to weigh in on a thread)

What other communication devices do we have in meatspace that we lack here?

I find myself agreeing with @keks

I'd actually like to see a greater abstraction. The word "like" forecloses meaning (just as "friend" does - a term I believe that we overload at different points of the stack but that's another conversation). I think it's great that people use it to mean more than a simple "like" but you also see people to hesitate to "like" a post that contains sad news or a distressing news story where those extra meanings come into conflict with the literal label.

(Let's leave aside the bookmarking function of likes as well where I'm liking something to make it easier to find in future.)

How about a dig/vote/like button that said something loosely analogous to the Zen Koan response: "Mu"?

So while I want to congratulate the foresight of the people designing the architecture of SSB to prioritise subjectivity (which helps a lot), I also want to notice that, like Loomio, probably the most important reason we're having great conversations here is because there are just not yet many different people interacting in the same space with very different intentions and backgrounds.

When trying to introduce ssb/patchwork to friends, this is among the skeptics they voice up. That is, ssb currently feel good because not much people yet in the network. Once we have spammers, and those click bait posts coming up, it will be no different than the other social networks or email.

Once we have spammers, and those click bait posts coming up, it will be no different than the other social networks or email.

In theory because you only replicate your friends and friends of friends, you only see posts from friends and friends of friends by default so if someone sets up an account and just starts churning out spam no one will follow it.

In practice, since most of us rely on pubs which act as friends there is an opportunity for spammers to follow the same pub as us.

That could however be addressed if spam and clickbait become a problem in future - and pubs might be considered a booster rocket that gets us out of the gravity well but which we will jettison once we are in orbit. They're necessary right now but hopefully we won't always need them or at least it will be trivially easy for people to set up smaller, private pubs and invite their friends.

If the clickbait is just coming from a real person within your social group then the solution is a slightly awkward conversation followed possibly by an unfollow or in extreme cases a block. That's not that different to how we would handle analogous situations in the physical social world.

another thing we could do is encrypt "likes". Encrypt only to your self: thats a bookmark. encrypt to the author - that is @mixmix's meaningful look, don't encrypt - thats a defacto endorsement. Once we have more private groups this could be even more nuanced.

@keks yeah, @paul added then removed emoji reactions - he was pretty ruthless removing things he didn't love.

@sam you've just pushed one of @dominic's tender rant buttons. He LOVES emojis, and also shares your passion for them as an emerging language.

My 2c on this would be that they are good, yes, and does anyone want to implement this. If it's a core maintainer, then can you help prioritise this in relation to accessibility, onboarding, replication reliability, and safety features D:
I'm not trying to be a dick, it's just genuinely this hard to balance all the things

These a great mock ups, thank you.

I feel bad saying that they only make me feel more strongly that I prefer an interface where you have to actively hover to see who has liked a message. Permanent visibility to my eyes makes collecting likes too compelling and risks pulling in a lot of the ugly behaviour we see on FB, Twitter etc where people play it like a game rather than using it as a platform to sincerely communicate with one another. Personally I love a very, very quiet interface where the words can speak for themselves and the interactions are more considered and likes are barely visible.

showing the avatars instead of a like count is pretty simple. Anyone want to try coding it? I'll support you

Downloaded the paper, I'll read it some time tomorrow (it's late here).

Thanks for the reference, @tunabananas

I've had a quick play with implementing this and I've been pleasantly surprised so far to see that my previous fear may have been wrong. Within a limited community, it feels genuinely meaningful to see icons of people who have dug a post rather than a count of likes. I think maybe I'm burned out seeing twitter posts with 20K likes (not my own, I hasten to add!) As long as we keep our communities small maybe it is in fact more pleasant to make these interactions more immediately visible? I am also assuming that we simply will not see likes from people outside our FOAF networks - although I guess ssb-ooo may change that?

The view raw message cog looks ugly next to the faces and I haven't worked out yet how to put them in a different position but I'm still playing and wanted to share my change of mind and an actual screengrab.

@mix I'm enjoying trying to work it for myself at the moment but please may I take you up on your offer when (not if!) I get stuck?

Note if someone else wants this in a hurry, I am going to be very slow and am perfectly happy not to be the roadblock and to step aside and let someone who can do this quickly take over.

for sure, HMU with questions or pull-requests. My preference would be to reveal identities on hover of the likes ticks.
If thats not your vibe this would be a good candidate for adding a settings page @tim and supporting both approaches!