MS Edge should not use 'Thumbs Up' to mean follow - it doesnt mean that, already.
(FWIW, 'thumbs up' in Rome meant 'death' to a combatant, not thumbs down, and historians STILL get it wrong due to it's current cultural use)
The User Experience teams at Microsoft (the industry exemplar during my career) have gotten lazy in their choice to use 'thumbs up/thumbs down' to indicate: SEE MORE / SEE LESS, or FOLLOW/UNFOLLOW
This creates confusion at best. I have to remind myself what you think it means daily and still misuse them. This is due to the attempt to 'reclaim' the defacto social media UI standard where these mean: LIKE / DISLIKE
To suggest that one should not want to follow news/articles related to things they 'dislike' is absurd and contributes directly to the failure of discourse and creation of echo chambers in media. Remember when RAID tried to combine severity & priority at MS? FAIL ;)
Made up sample news title examples:
* "Your home town enacts a ban on recycling of all kinds."
>> You suggest that if I want to hear more, I should click 'Thumbs up!' Yay for bad laws!
* "Giggle-Balloon-Pop game eases kids anxiety and is recommended for pre-teens"
>> You suggest, though I am happy that teens feel better, I should click 'Thumbs down!' or suddenly see all things tween.
* "Political big-wig steals money and gets away with it!"
>> You suggest that if I want to hear more, I should click 'Thumbs up!' Yea for crooks!
Thumbs up/down are *already* well established as THE known way to REACT with opinion.
Pretending that they should represent EDGE icons for 'Follow/Unfollow' does not change this.
We look to Microsoft for expert leadership in User Design, and functional standards; but this is not it.
Consider the 'Plus/Minus' signs or invent a new icon. Experiment with the idea that offensive content can be filtered WITHOUT the need to follow anything, or have our feed manipulated by algorithm.
I want to filter my news SOURCES, like 'WeHateDogs.com' but you give me just ~100 to block, and scrape the web to present new untrusted sources daily. Should we want/need to filter by 'topic we like', the functionality exists as a tab like 'Sports' - just like I never read the sports page in the newspaper.
Thank you for accepting my challenge to think beyond marketing's great ideas we never wanted.
Chris
