Social media is supposed to be the digital commons. Without a dislike button, then the media cannot be a commons. You go to the town square and start spouting offensive bullshit you’re going to get the proverbial rotten tomatoes thrown at you, mockery, and getting shunned.

With only having a like button, Twitter amplifies the message of bad actors and encourages rage responses. That’s the point though isn’t it? Engagement metrics to sell rage at a discount instead of the whole normal population buying a post with dislikes and moving on.

we don’t need to watch animal farm play out in social media form, thanks.

I think that people would just don’t like/upvote any posts and keep those fake internet points for themselves

And/or they would create a lot of fake accounts to upvote their content.

I imagine I’d probably just not like anything. Not worth the effort of managing.

They would have real tangible value and became an asset subject to speculation and manipulation like crypto.

I would predict even more botting would be used to influence likes/dislikes as limiting them would make them even more influential.

I’d also bet on their being even more useless comments saying expressing people’s like or dislike of something, which might be good for engagement numbers but bad for overall conversation.

It would have to scale with the number of posts or something. Since new content is constantly being created, but no new likes, you would have a situation where the system runs out fast, and new content, no matter how valuable, would have a very hard time getting any likes.

Also, how would you determine who has control of the likes?