While I find 'liking' things rather petty in general, why would a service allow users to 'Dislike' videos and comments? This just creates for a bad user-experience in my opinion. It's so easy for someone to dislike something, instead of articulating what exactly they dislike. We can never stop assholes from leaving rude or arrogant comments, be you can control a user receiving a negative comment.

Woops! I meant to say: 'notification' not 'comment'.

I think that knee-jerk likes AND dislikes are not all that useful. The way that TED talks provides adjectives is interesting. Far more interesting to know that a critical mass finds a talk "engaging" "well-designed" "unconvincing" "long-winded" or "shocking" is much more helpful.

dl.dropbox.com

Staples has a similar, much more fulsome way to describe what one thinks about a product. However, very few folks seem to use it.

The issue, I suppose, is that this thoughtful analysis takes more than one click ... and so we are left with like/dislike.

dl.dropbox.com

The Ted example is really interesting though. I also imagine people would use it more if you only had to select one (maybe fewer categories). Even then, if there could be negative categories, so long as they're contructive ie: "too long" etc.

Thanks for sharing that!

I guess for most people the feature creates a better, “safer” experience because disliked (“down voted”) videos and comments get lower visibility. That’s probably enough in most cases.

In the past, I’ve found the like/dislike ratio helpful myself: it served me as a quick indicator if a video is a fake or duplicate with low quality when searching for leaked rap tracks. :)

I kind of like what urtak.com is doing — it feels like a fun, easy way to get a bit more out of the users by not overwhelming them with options as in the Staples example.

That's pretty cool, I never even realized people use it that way (to vote something down that's not credible). I've always thought it was just used in a malicious way. +1 is pretty awesome for this because it obscures the layer of negativity, but it would also be cool (for the scenario you described) to be able to -1 a post as well.

Also, the Urtak plug in is really cool!

One area where like/dislike is not useful is in politics ... or anywhere the like/dislike is more about disliking the idea itself vs. the quality of the presentation.