What is the term to use for "likes" and "dislikes" on social networks? Are they marks or grades or rates or anything else?
My purpose is that I'm programming a system where I have a Post domain object. It can be liked or disliked (as in every social network). Then how should the enumeration type representing these two values be named?
Given that upvotes is roughly synonymous with likes, and downvotes is roughly synonymous with dislikes, I might just call the general class votes.
Generally speaking reactions would apply here and is used on the messaging platform Slack.
Whether it's a like, a dislike, a thumbs up, a heart or a pizza emoji, the users are reacting to the post, so it makes sense to record these as reactions.
You could consider using rating which means:
A classification or ranking of someone or something based on a comparative assessment of their quality, standard, or performance
Rating is a broadly used word when evaluating movies and TV shows. I don't see any reason why it can't be used when ranking or evaluating a post domain object.
[Oxford Online Dictionary]
rating is calculated aggregation value over all votes done by anyone, but not the set of possible options which consists of like and dislike.
The best term would depend on the type of feedback system being used, though a more general term can always be used in place of a specific one:
Likes only: like, preference, upvote, recommendation, etc.
Likes and dislikes only (not always subtracted from each other): vote, mark
Multidimensional feedback (eg like, lol, sad, angry): feedback, reaction (what Facebook calls them), opinion, etc.
In a more generic sense, the term reputation as used by this site, is in the ball park.
It also yields some potentially fitting synonyms.
X = count(likes) - count(dislikes) for all votes on this post by users can be named as reputation, but it doesn't represent single vote.
When dealing with likes and dislikes in Social Media programmatically we generally referred to the term 'Sentiment'.
If you wanted to refer to both likes and dislikes, and their equivalent on other sites that don't use those terms, you could refer to them as:
Positive and negative interactions on posts.
Actions could also be used in place of interactions and may be preferable.
Since they could also apply to comments, you could label comments as:
Positive and negative exchanges on posts.
to create a distinction between them.
Civilians might get a laugh to know
Ikes
is sometimes used for this, on the inside of social media database and software engineering.
There's no really good word that perfectly characterizes like, not-like, dislike and not-dislike {noting that not-like may or may not be the same as dislike, depending on the milieu .. not-like'ing a like on a post is totally different from dislike-ing a post .. depending on various things like what history is tracked, etc etc.}
Anyways
Ikes
is the smart-ass answer IF, that's if, in terms of my pithy and critical comment above ...
@pkuderov a critical issue is this ..... do you want this term TO USE AS A CIVILIAN DESCRIBING THESE THINGS. Or, are you a software engineer looking for the best term to use literally as a Class name, Parse (HAHAHA) Class name or the like ? If the former, probably "vote", if the latter, perhaps "mark" since "vote" is a more general thing. But see my pithy answer.
... if you were asking about the latter.
If you're asking about the former, it would be pretty awesome if "Ike" caught on in general parlance. So ...
Check out this post, did you ike it yet? Which way?!
... sort of thing. My local sports radio channel often discusses social media posts, you can imagine them saying something like
such-and-such got thousands of ikes, but half are likes and half are dislikes.
This is feedback on the original post.
"Feedback" is a generic English term that means to give back to the author of some content an idea of whether you thought that content was good or bad. Typically seen as solicited by a service or product vendor (as in "send us your feedback; let us know how we're doing!") or as a categorisation term within software to describe mechanisms that allow users to rank or rate dynamically-managed content.
I think they are a way to express preferences:
- the selecting of someone or something over another or others.
(The Free Dictionary)
preferences is too ambigous in almost any domain model
I would use the term "flag" and "flag setting" which is the terminology employed by the Drupal content management system (CMS) as it is generic and can be applied to systems that express preferences, but also to systems that record reactions, votes, and any other type of interaction regardless of context.
Acceptance. It's a trait inherent to the object, not the observer, and it reflects a reaction of either approval or disapproval.
If we were to use popular social media platforms as a reference, then what facebook has introduced in its latest offering is a set of reactions that you can apply to posts.
Given that facebook was among the first to introduce the 'like' concept, I guess it would be a matter of time before the term comes into mainstream usage.
