"But remember what the original Reddit team revealed back in 2005 about the purpose of downvotes, and remember that forcibly-displayed popularity totals are a form of branding. Like hot-ironed grades on the backs of livestock."
Their goal is to play us off against each other, for their ultimate benefit. The butter-wouldn't-melt authoritarians behind Web 2.0 strive to create in us a level of status-anxiety which will drive us to serve their needs.
They force us into a giant league table, in which we're constantly compared, and comparing ourselves, to others. We're devalued as people; reduced to scores. And the only way we can improve as “a score”, is to help Zuck, Dorsey, or any of the other tech moguls, increase their imcomprehensible wealth. The system was designed that way.
Social media might be the king of online oppression today, but it learned its craft from an earlier generation of user generated content (UGC) platforms. And in this post I'll call upon the history of public Web platforms to show that the button-click economy - Likes, Follows, etc. - has never been about giving people the means to show gratitude or interest. What it's really about, apart from gathering exploitable data, is coercively controlling contributors. Psychologically forcing contributors to labour - sometimes at the expense of their mental health - for the platforms' ultimate gain.
You see, social media is not leisure. It's work, which is paid in egotistical relief. That's not necessarily egotistical gain, by the way. Only, by default, egotistical relief. Yes. The oligarchs for whom we work, on social media, create for us a realm of artificial, egotistical pain, which we can relieve by doing things that benefit them. Most typically increasing the digital footfall on their monetised web properties. Most of us know we're doing this work. But few of us see how deliberately and calculatingly we're being browbeaten into it.
THE FORCIBLE DISPLAY OF USER SCORES
Have you ever looked at your Followers total on Twitter and thought: “Why can't I hide that?”… I mean, if I have a Followers total of zero (otherwise known as “no one likes you”), and that total is forcibly displayed to the world, that's a form of humiliation, right? Yes. It is. So why do we think social media bosses subject us to this humiliation? Do we think it's…
a) Because they're too stupid to realise that being high-key branded as “Mr/Ms No One Likes You” would be humiliating, and no one has ever told them?
b) Because they want to use that humiliation as a means to control our behaviour - i.e. coerce us into pestering our friends to join, or placing ads, or indulging in transactional behaviours that ultimately benefit them?
I'll leave you to think about that while we get started on the history. Remember the 1990s?…
EARLY USER SCORING SYSTEMS
User scoring systems were not an invention of social media platforms. Wikipedia cites the first Like button as appearing on the video platform Vimeo in 2005. But scoring systems had actually been in use since the 1990s, and are referenced in early FAQs for UGC sites like Slashdot (karma score), and its lookalike Kuro5hin (mojo score). These early systems were a bit more complex than those found on social media today, but if you read the breakdown you can see they were just as much about controlling behaviour, and in particular, about steering contributing members towards posting in a way that benefitted the sites.
USER RANKINGS ARE INTENTIONALLY PUNITIVE
In 2005, Reddit launched with both cumulative karma scoring and upvoting/downvoting per post. But more importantly, the site very explicitly, in its original FAQ, described negative button clicks as a punishment…
"When a particular item is promoted or demoted, the user who posted it is either rewarded or punished..."
Wow. “Punished”. Think about that for a moment. Do people really deserve to be punished for contributing to a website FOR FREE? I mean, they might deserve punishment if they deliberately set out to derail the success of the platform or serve themselves at the platform's expense. But just because the thing they posted was not to everyone's taste? That's not an offence. Why should it carry a punishment?
COP-OUT
It's here that we arrive at the reality of what the original user-ranking and scoring systems really were. They were a bad alternative to internal moderation. A means of exporting high-volume moderation of UGC content to the unvetted masses.
The goal of these sites was to control the behaviour of their contributors - which, within reason, is understandable in itself. But they either couldn't or wouldn't allocate internal resources to that, so they instead farmed out the control to the general public.
The problem? The public have different motivations from the site owners. They're less motivated by the general success of the website, and more motivated by personal issues like ego, transactional exchange, ideology, inter-competitiveness, jealousy, etc… There is some overlap, so farming out editorial control to the public does provide a vague substitute for internal moderation. But it comes at a price. And it's highly oppressive, because unless the scores are hidden from public view - which they're very deliberately not - it subjects every contributor to potential public humiliation.
ARE SOME USER-RANKING SYSTEMS SEXIST?
There is also evidence that women - statistically more sensitive to criticism than men - are disproportionately uncomfortable with downvoting systems. This suggests that calculatedly punitive systems could be unfairly excluding women and giving an advantage to men. Certainly on Reddit, YouTube and other downvote-featured platforms that have a substantial or even overwhelming male majority, you can't really explain the gender imbalance with subject focus, because there is no subject focus.
The problems that visibly punitive scoring systems cause are not trivial if they're skewing gender equality. And the evidence suggests that they are.
OPPRESSION BY STEALTH
Whereas older forums have often freely admitted that their systems were designed to control and even punish contributors, social media has been slicker and much more coy about its intentions. It generally opposes (or at least less often implements) downvoting, and it likes us to believe that its user scoring and ranking systems are only positive.
But they're not. Social media forcibly “badges” or “brands” its users with popularity scores, such that everyone using the platforms is defined by those scores. On social media, it's not about what we say. It's about the “badge” we wear. And we'll say anything to get the right badge.
So what is the right badge? It's a higher total of Followers than the total your peers have. It's a little “K” next to the Like total on your tweet. There's no technical reason why these numbers and totals could not be displayed optionally, as they are on some alternative social platforms. Displaying them by force is a very conscious decision on the part of the big platforms. And the reason they made that decision is that they want to use psychological tenets such as status-anxiety and humiliation against us, to serve their own ends. It's very authoritarian. Very oppressive. Very manipulative. And you can't use the sites without being governed by it.
We've already seen that these badging or branding systems strangle individuality and promote groupthink, as people with lower scores try to gain high scores by saying things they know will appeal to the widest possible collective. Even if they themselves don't believe what they're saying, other people will, and that creates a very plastic, repetitive, tedious and aggressive society.
It's only when you escape from all of this into an offline social circle that you realise how much damage it does to communication. How it turns natural love and unity into completely irrational, competitive, bitter anger. But some people don't have the option to retreat offline. And those socially isolated people - often people with existing mental health issues - are the ones the system punishes the most.
The platform bosses know very well that having no Followers is publicly humiliating, but they don't play the total down. They highlight it, in the most visible places available. If I mouse-hover over your username on Twitter, a small summary of you will pop up. Literally the biggest and boldest piece of text on that small summary is your popularity score. It's bigger than your actual name.
That's not an oversight. It's tech's digital version of a hot-iron branding. It's extremely deliberate. And the people running these vast monoliths of communication and publishing know that users will do everything they can to avoid the public humiliation that comes from having a low-scoring badge. They know that users will take proactive steps to amass followers, and that in the process of this, the platform will gain.
GROWTH STRATEGY
Social media differed in its growth strategy from traditional forums and message boards. Both resources would go through a startup phase, during which they'd proactively “recruit” users. But after that first phase, the forums would generally rely on the web search presence of their content to draw in visitors - some of whom would then convert to members. Social media couldn't do that, since its content was vastly more self-orientated and disorganised than that on trad forums, and was therefore considered largely useless by search engines.
So the social platforms had to (and still do have to) grow through continued “recruitment” of new members. Obviously there soon comes a point in the upscaling of a new site, where the management can no longer meet the requirements of their external recruitment campaign. So the recruitment is farmed out to… guess who… Yep, the good old general public.
Social media expected its users to invite their families, friends and colleagues. And the way it communicated and drove that expectation was by shaming each and every user who didn't invite their families, friends and colleagues, with a special, irremovable badge that simply said: ZERO.
Shaming via an irremovable badge had precedents and parallels in forum and message board culture. On some boards, new members would be badged as “Beginner” or “Novice” to shame them into making a hundred posts. To shame them into labouring for the administration's financial gain. Their “reputation” score would be forcibly displayed. Officially, to motivate better behaviour. But unofficially, to help drive labour through artificially-induced competition and humiliation.
Any measure that creates uninvited competition and sets people against each other should be regarded with deep suspicion. And that's what all user-scoring with a forcible public display does. Whether you're talking about Likes, Karma, Reps, User Titles, Upvotes, Downvotes, Follower Totals… If it's forcibly displayed to the public, it is, as the founders of Reddit once admitted, a means not only to reward contributors who behave as the platform wants them to, but to punish contributors who don't.
THE REALITY OF FORCIBLY-DISPLAYED USER-SCORING
We must acknowledge that the internal moderation of huge UGC platforms is difficult. But we must also acknowledge that the practices these platforms currently use as an alternative are designed to humiliate members of the public, and they do go further than just discouraging bad behaviour. In fact, it can be argued that displaying engagement totals as a frontline badge of rank or status has actually encouraged bad behaviour.
On Twitter, for example, the visible success of hate tweets, as measured by their forcibly-displayed Retweet and Like totals, appears to have ballooned hate speech beyond anything we could have imagined twenty years ago. And again, these badging systems are not something you go and check on some back page. As we've seen, they're placed at the very forefront of the visible interface. Deliberately.
So continue as you were. But remember what the original Reddit team revealed back in 2005 about the purpose of downvotes, and remember that forcibly-displayed popularity totals are a form of branding. Like hot-ironed grades on the backs of livestock. Remember that these systems enormously help the already successful, and further handicap those who most need a break. They're not designed to be fair, and they don't treat people as humans. Their sole purpose is to maximise the prosperity of the platform. Nothing else matters - and that includes our mental health.