maybe arbitrary isn’t the right word. i’m not saying it isn’t important, or that companies don’t manipulate the UI to encourage certain behaviors. i’m saying that elements of the UI have no intrinsic, obvious meaning. a downvote is socially constructed, its purpose is ambiguous, and its impact on our free speech is not a self-evident. its impact on a platform is complex, multifaceted, and difficult to describe fully.

you may think that the removal of a downvote is an obvious attack on free expression, but, again, there are arguments against features like the downvote which do not rely on greed or a desire to repress. downvotes were invented by these companies, the social act of downvoting somebody became possible alongside the UIs that implemented it, and the utility and role of that UI feature exists within its context. downvoting is not a natural feature of human communication, its like a social prosthetic, an ability which did not exist before it was created for us.

its kinda like a handshake. we all know what a handshake means, right? but no, not really. if you went elsewhere in the world, it might mean something very different, or nothing at all. even within our culture, some people might think its really important to have a firm handshake, and other people might not care. some people might find it gross. some people might refuse to shake the hands of certain kinds of people. some people don’t have hands to shake. there is, in some sense, a social role to the handshake. it’s a greeting, or an agreement, or a sign of respect. but pinning down exactly what it means is really difficult, because its value and social role are constructed by the society in which they operate, and the people who use it.

i’m not saying these companies aren’t attempting to alter their platform to influence human behavior. they are doing that. but, frankly, the level of actual fine grained control they have over how people socially construct their UI features is nowhere near absolute, or even particularly logical. they may think that removing UI features, altering how they work, will lead to specific outcomes, but as we have seen with things like Twitter’s verification, how users will interpret and socially construct those features is not fully under Twitter’s control. the culture of a website is not the UI implementation, its how people decide to use that implementation. and for downvotes, we know it isn’t an unalloyed good. because downvotes can do different things on different platforms, the actual utility being removed really has to be determined from the specific implementation we’re talking about, but in most implementations, downvotes affect discoverability. highly downvoted topics may be deprioritized, put at the bottom of a thread, something like that. maybe it increases visibility, if a platform feels that people should see what other people seem to hate alot. the impact a downvote has on a discussion is, therefore, really not just a binary good or bad, its complex. if downvotes increase visibility, you may be encouraging attention seekers to behave poorly on purpose. if downvotes decrease visibility, you might be facilitating the ability for groups of users to censor other user’s opinions. if they are subtracted from upvotes and represented with a single number, thats different than if the proportion of upvotes and downvotes is made visible to the user. if your total quantity of upvotes and downvotes affects what abilities you have on the platform, different users may be stratified into enforced social castes by the platform’s code.

i’m not saying that corporations are doing a good job, i’m saying that we cannot take at face value the goodness or badness of any particular UI feature, and cannot assume that these companies are removing or adding features specifically for the goal of reducing free expression, because the relationship between profit and freedom of speech is not a simple one. lots of online social media platforms are not currently profitable. reddit isn’t. twitch isn’t. twitter isn’t. so they don’t necessarily know what changes they have to make in order to become profitable, they’re just doing what they think will make them profitable.