Frank Chimero’s observations on “small and vague positivity vs. big and specific negativity” (via Khaled Abou Alfa) are spot-on in a way I’m surprised I haven’t run into before, and in a way that makes you wish we’d been discussing things this way the entire time. It’s a very stark illustration of the exact ways in which the engagement metrics of mainstream social media increase both the volume and visibility of negative feedback at the expense of positive feedback.
“A thousand likes doesn’t look much bigger than one,” Chimero writes, while “one negative reply literally takes up more visual space”. But it’s tough to break those “habit loops” and I continue to like and retweet things on Twitter throughout the day. Spending time in different environments can change how we think about things like Likes, as it did for Jean MacDonald but for some, like me, it will be hard to change our behavior on sites still designed for excitation over expression, indication over interaction.
There’s talk of Twitter experimenting with hiding engagement counts, but is hiding the number sufficient to change the behavior?
Honestly, I barely look at the numbers on tweets. I like and retweet because the buttons are right there, and also because, well, it’s easier on my brain than figuring out, every time something strikes me, how exactly to say something about what someone else has said, and I usually can’t get past the feeling that even were I to reply to someone with, say, a thumbs-up emoji, on a site designed with a built-in “like” button this would seem weird and off-putting if not unsettling.
Design breeds culture and the culture of a space like Twitter leans toward hitting that button rather than really engaging. That said, how much real engagement can one person do in any given day? Let alone someone with, say, a tricky psychic constellation of autism and anxiety that makes those buttons so much more appealing.