Why “F*ck the likes”?
· Stereotype
While we’ve been working on this project we’ve been considering the seemingly obvious questions - what can users post, how will profiles work etc. But when the question of how we should handle “likes” came up, the instant knee-jerk response was “fuck the likes”.
“Liking”, or adding a response to content is ubiquitous across social media - every platform has some way of responding to users’ posts, often with a single tap. So surely we should have our own equivalent… right…?
For us, it comes down to what we want Stereotype to be, and ultimately, why we think it should exist. As we outlined in our manifesto, community is at the heart of everything - creating meaningful connections, sharing recommendations and opinions and hopefully providing a way for people to discover their next favourite artists. It’s the human side of this that’s the key here. And with that in mind, a feature that requires minimal thought, minimal engagement and only serves to fuel metrics used to limit what you see just didn’t seem to fit with what we’re trying to do.
We want to get away from passive interactions. Yes, you could hear a track you like, or read an album review that resonates with you and tap once to respond to it, but it’s so much more meaningful to write a reply, or to share it and recommend it to others, to amplify what you’ve enjoyed or found meaningful. “Likes” aren’t for users and they aren’t for creators. Platforms use them to funnel creators into artificial popularity contests and to make sure they can serve you ads you’re likely to click on. When was the last time you decided to listen to something because it had the most likes on Instagram?
So fuck the likes. Let’s create a community where we can tell people that we loved their gig review, where we recommend that track we’ve loved to our friends, where we have conversations and genuinely share our opinions with each other. And who knows, if we don’t have those popularity contest numbers to limit the content you see, maybe you’ll discover something you’d never have come across otherwise.
- Dan & Hannah