I was very comfortable with BF for many years and never thought much about the likes for a long time.
You do the forum thing professionally nowadays and you’ve thought a lot about it, but I honestly believe that likes, upvotes, etc transform the interaction from conversation to conversation+signaling.
When you reply to somebody and actually use words to engage with them it creates conversation. When you upvote/downvote or like/withhold like, you merely perpetuate a simplistic signaling system that is much less nuanced and much lower stakes. It doesn’t add to the conversation, it only layers signaling on top of the conversation and personally I came to see that set of signals as being toxic to the conversation.
I think the effect is subtle but very crappy and I really hope it doesn’t get added here. :P