When I was growing up, my parents taught me that if you couldn’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. When I grew up, I figured out that that was bullshit, but I still tend to hold the line.
Google, Facebook, and others don’t seem to understand that the lack of a negative reinforcement signal does not help to generate results that users want.
I’m tired, namely, of this appearing in various, completely unrelated search results on YouTube:
How about a “never show me this again” option? Or an Unlike button. Without Unlike, all of the possible Likes in the universe are biased in such a way that you have only two choices, with the first being a conflated form of “I dislike it and would gladly never see it again / I am ambivalent about it and couldn’t care less” and the second being “Like”.
On YouTube, I believe you can downvote a video, after you’ve clicked on it, which seems kind of stupid, since it gives the uploader the view they so desperately want. There should be an option to remove items you find stupid when you’re hovering over suggestions, and that ought to count in some way against them.
I suppose the only saving grace is that it’s a good thing that the social network operators of the world only know my Likes, but not yet my Dislikes. The higher their signal to noise ratio gets, the creepier the online experience becomes.
What we really need is a browser plugin that works like AdBlock but instead hides the suggested videos on the right side of Youtube, the “other suggested articles” at the bottom of every article and blog post, and other links designed to catch your eye and distract you. That’s what’s creating this race to the bottom and the “hate click” bait you’re talking about.