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Likes are the engagement lifeblood of most social media platforms, but dislikes have had more of a complicated history.

Different companies have recently taken different tacks regarding the ability to express your displeasure for various posts and comments: YouTube removed Dislike counts, while Twitter is experimenting with downvoting Replies. Public downvotes have been a big part of the culture on Reddit, while reactions such as “Sad” have been used for varying purposes on apps like Facebook, and apps like LinkedIn have avoided the feature altogether.

TikTok is perhaps merging these newer downvoting approaches: TikTok will now allow downvotes on post comments (the Twitter approach) while also hiding the dislike count (the YouTube approach).

The reasoning behind this approach sounds brilliant:

The point is to keep improving TikTok’s culture. According to Social Media Today, it all comes down to identifying and decreasing negative behaviors in the app. This aligns with TikTok’s stated goal of fostering kindness and safety:

3️⃣ Our main priority with this feature is to create a better experience for our community. With this in mind, the total number of dislikes a comment has will not be shown and people can take back their feedback by tapping again whenever they like.

— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) September 23, 2022

The TikTok team hopes that dislikes will help moderators identify issues on the platform while also preventing further abuse: Since the dislike count will be hidden, it will be less enticing for users to gang up on people (i.e. “brigading”) or simply downvote harmless opinions with which they disagree.

Why it Matters

Social media companies are under immense pressure from many sides to improve the culture on their apps. The ability to surface problematic/hurtful comments while also limiting the ability to abuse the features for their own purpose could make TikTok a leader in this effort.

This new feature is worth keeping an eye on to understand what the future of content moderation might look like.