LinkedIn: Dislike Option Needed

Allowing the freedom of expression on any online platform is fraught with risk - once the comment door opens, the trolls emerge.

Back in March, Norway's NRKbeta came up with something very cool. To combat the trolling problem, NRKbeta introduced a quiz which people had to answer before they were allowed to make comments. This stopped fly-by provocation and suppressed the trolls. Source and an update.

I like LinkedIn and have used it for many years. They've made it now so you can adjust the feed to more content you want to see which is good. You can also follow people and see their postings. But the major drawback, I think, is the absence of a downvote option.

Why is this important?

Because the thumbs up option is outdated. We live in a review-based society. We are making decisions based on what other people have experienced. Everything is searchable. Purchases are being made online to offline, online to online, and offline to online. There's a lot of content posted on LinkedIn but the only way to express how you feel, now, is either by liking, commenting or skipping.

If a dislike button was introduced, this will give readers more choice. Maybe, instead of hitting downvote and flying away, the mechanism is you have to leave a comment explaining why you didn't like a piece of content.

Amazon, YouTube, Imgur, Booking.com. Facebook, IMDB, Agoda and more all have more advanced expression mechanisms. I believe it encourages greater interaction and gives people more choice.

LinkedIn could offer the downvote as a value add for premium users. Having the ability to downvote also gives the easy option to set up polls. For example,

• Question: Do you think you should be able to change the colour of your profile page?
• Answer: Click [thumbs up] for yes and [thumbs down] for no.

A dislike button is the next step for LinkedIn. The actual mechanism needs some thought.