We are all used to all social media having some kind of a like feature. It might have a different name & symbol, but the functionality is the same. I personally don't like any posts on Instagram except my friends pictures, so it doesn't have effect for me. If I had to choose between two pictures & give my like to it, I would make more sense.
What does it even tell you, that a post has 5 thousand likes? That 5 thousand people like it? I don't think so.
I won't go into the issue of fake likes, even if all the likes were from real people it has little actual value.
When I discovered that almost social media sites use the same like feature I decided to build a social media site that simply wouldn't.
So how? I could simply just not put the like button there and make it something like 4chan, but that misses the point. I want users to have express their opinion.
This excludes other ways to represent the level of engagement like stars or rating out of ten.
What I though about is Tinder, the user action there is forced, thus becomes something like scrolling. But if the user had to choose between liking and disliking a post every post would have little dislikes since you don't have any reason to dislike a random post, so you just like it. This wouldn't work for simple posts and it's very iffy if it actually works on the before mentioned Tinder.
The answer is choosing. The user gets displayed two images at once and they simply have to choose between one of them. The one they choose gets the point (like). Bad posts get a small amount of likes, good ones don't. This is a better system than the one other sites use.
One possible problem of this system might be that the user uses their brain while using the site. Since they are thinking about which posts they like more they start thinking about other things: "Do I have something better to do?". This stops the dopamine feed and our brain activity monopoly is stopped.
But this site isn't the first one like this, for example BeReal already explicitly focuses on specifically this.
If you want to try the site out, it is here:
Swipechoose
I also made a quick Youtube video on this topic:
Swipechoose video
The code of the site is here:
Github
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