I’ve been an avid user of LinkedIn for a long time, and it is genuinely a fantastic website to use. It can help the unemployed find work, the prospective student get into school, a hopeful founder find capital, and so much more. Much like it’s other Silicon Valley contemporaries, it allows its users to post articles, links, statuses and even drop a Like to induce a momentary hit of dopamine. However, one feature is still clearly missing; the ability to dislike something.
For several years now, LinkedIn has provided users with the ability to Like content on the platform. This is done for a variety of reasons, many of which covered in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Chief among these reasons is it provides the algorithm a data-point about you. When you Like something, you are essentially instructing the algorithm to show you similar content. This technique is useful to keeping users glued to the screen for ever-increasingly lengths of time. The more time one spends doing this, the more data that is collected and then sold to advertisers, and so on.
Then, LinkedIn’s talented team innovated, much like the spirit of their ingenious founder Reid Hoffman (his podcast Masters of Scale is absolutely worth a listen!) and created variations of the Like button. There is a Funny button, a Love button, and several more. Each of these buttons serve a similar purpose to the Like button yet are distinct enough from one another to warrant their own signal. After all, providing a Like about your favorite small business getting acquired by a conglomerate sends a different message than clicking the Funny button or the Support button would.
LinkedIn has a button that serves as an unintended proxy to a Dislike button, and that is the Curious button. I’m sure most LinkedIn users have seen a connection of theirs become curious about a topic that they would disagree with in real-life. That is the issue with the Curious button; it sends an ambiguous message to the algorithm-and to a certain extent, unfamiliar humans. Installing a clear Dislike button would eliminate the possible misinterpretations that the Curious button currently generates. The Curious button simply is not as useful to LinkedIn’s true customer base-advertisers-as a Dislike button would be. If a company selling a product or service receives thousands or millions of dislikes on a post, that would serve as a useful indicator to their development team.
An educational YouTuber named CGP Grey also shed some light on this topic several years ago; content that makes us angry is more likely to have us engage the algorithm. Adding in a Dislike button will signal to the algorithm what is likely to enrage a user, which would drive them to furiously comment away in the comment section, create inflammatory posts of their own, and further drive engagement. A Dislike button would serve as a great measuring stick to this purpose. The report mechanic already serves this purpose, but I suspect it is heavily underutilized in its current state relative to Likes. Therefore, installing a Dislike button would simplify this process, rather than make the user answer a few questions to submit a report to the algorithm on content they dislike. The platform does not require this onerous process for providing Likes. Catching people’s knee-jerk reactions is often much more useful than collecting their well-thought-out statements.
A Dislike button could be used to further refine the algorithm in terms of content curation as well. This will be used to create a further-customized feed for each individual user, showing them increasingly more and more bespoke content. This has the societal risk of creating intellectual islands and cultural echo chambers, but we as a society have already collectively decided that those trends are not a concern to us. Besides, as I stated from my Ode to Radicalization article, I could always use more informants!
While we’re in the vein of ideology, the Dislike button would serve as a useful tool for helping humans to screen each other out. A hiring manager could use a candidate’s history of dislikes (this would be publicly displayed on your page, just as Likes currently are) as a filter to sift through candidates that are unlikely to be a cultural fit A university’s admissions office, or a venture capitalist could sift through an applicant’s history of Dislikes for the same reason. I know, the inevitable cries of That’s discrimination! will come; however, it is naïve to believe that this isn’t already happening.
A Dislike button is not even an entirely novel concept (hence the title of this article). LinkedIn’s contemporaries, YouTube and Reddit, both already have the function built-in. The founders of YouTube and Reddit worked at PayPal during the late nineties and early 2000’s during Reid Hoffman’s tenure as well, so it is sort of shocking that Reid Hoffman never picked up on the idea (and as stated earlier, I am a big fan of Mr. Hoffman’s-he’s legitimately a sharp guy and deserves his billions of dollars). The only difference is that Reddit’s downvote mechanic hides content, acting as a de facto form of censorship by the masses, while the Dislike button that I’m proposing would serve as a megaphone.
Overall, the Dislike button would serve several useful functions on the platform, and frankly is a little baffling that the feature doesn’t already exist. As unpaid data-sources for Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s algorithm, we hold more power than we realize. If we all collectively stopped generating data for the algorithm, then LinkedIn would simply have no choice but to give in and install a feature that should be a quick fix for them. And if you disagree with my reasoning, make sure to get mad and drop a Dislike on your way out…
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