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Tim Tebow Is Right: We Should Replace the Like Button With a Respect Button
The athlete asked audiences how they’d feel about a respect button instead of a like button. It’s a good question.
Tim Tebow wants to know: would you rather have 110 “likes” or 34 “respects”?
I’m curious how he came up with those specific numbers, but the football/baseball player’s quasi-inspirational, thought-leadery question, which he posted on Twitter and on his website last week, is more compelling than it might seem at first glance. “Respect” buttons are already here on some social media sites. Although they rarely appear in lieu of likes, recommends, loves, and faves, they are shown to have positive effects on the tenor of social media conversations, and can even make those conversations less partisan and inflammatory. In an age when social media and comments sections can be a scary hotbed of hostility, any small, simple modifications we can make to improve those spaces should be seriously considered (among the many sweeping changes desperately needed to improve social media platforms).
Because “likes” and other forms of “one-click communication” are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively new, there’s not a ton of research on them, but much of it shows that their current deployment…
