Yes, the little I see of Facebook I’ll often see a post with 15 likes and only one reply. It doesn’t seem to foment discussion.
Be that as it may, if the site goes with likes, the sky is not going to fall. It would be nice to have the option to not even see them, though. I really don’t want to think about likes. I don’t want likes to color my impressions of or reactions to someone else’s thoughts.
I like a man of virtue.
Have I lost an eighth?
And we are live.
The limit is set to 100 per day, which should be plenty, right? For the purposes of our month-long experiment, I agree with folks who suggest there’s no point limiting them. Let’s see how they turn out before we fuss with their value or scarcity.
To answer a couple of questions, there isn’t any metric for evaluating whether the experiment is a success. This is just a “see how it feels for everyone” kinda thing. There is no math involved.
Discourse can use likes to weight posts and recommendations and whatnot, but we aren’t using any of those tools. You’ll experience the forum the same way you’ve been experiencing it, with the exception of the little hearts at the bottom of each post and whatever numbers are next to them.
And just a reminder that after a month, we’re having a month of going back to no likes before making a decision. Even if they’re wildly successful and everyone loves them and decides they can’t bear to post without them, there will be a mandatory month of disabled likes so we can see how it feels to be without them.
So, everyone have it. Welcome to the pervasive effect of social media! You may commence participating!
-Tom
Ah, so a cooling off period, as it were…
Thanks for being open minded enough to run the experiment, Tom.
My personal hypothesis is that likes will make little to no difference on the conversation here, and that those who use them will enjoy the opportunity to do so, while those that do not will find it fairly easy to tune them out. I hope my win-win scenario turns out to be true!
FYI, I didn’t actually see the hearts until I logged out and back in.
Edit to add: I can’t like my own posts? OUTRAGEOUS!
♫ You’re so vain, you probably think this like is about you… ♫
I “liked” Tom’s message about turning on likes.
It begins.
Finally, a chance to show my appreciation for the drilling-holes-in-a-monitor thread.
I’m anti-like for forums, but generally willing to play along if they are, in fact, present. On my way from Tom’s likes-are-on post to here, though, I hovered over the wee heart button a couple of times, but thought to myself, “No, that isn’t the Qt3 way.”
On this first day of this, the like-opalypse, I’m experiencing much anxiety about running out of likes because of the unnaturally low amount of likes-per-day allowed. It’s totally like like range-anxiety!
For every like you give one of my posts I’ll give you two likes back. You’ll be doubling your likes in no time!
A like refractory period, so to speak.
If I’m being honest I’m probably a lot more tickled by the ability to “like” posts than I should be.
The heart symbol makes me feel like I’m loving posts rather than simply liking them. I don’t want to come on too strong.
Don’t tease me.
I don’t like likes, but these are pretty innocuous. No garish colors/animations/etc. I’m not even bothered enough to figure out how to turn them off (immediately, anyway). So well done!
It’s a little weird to see likes here, after a year without them. The forum and the community work just fine without them. That said, they’re Mostly Harmless™. I’ve liked a few things and wondered if I should be replying instead. However, one of the posts that I liked was a description of strategy in Stellaris, and I’m not at a point where I really have anything substantive to add to that conversation. Liking the post was a good way for me to express my appreciation for it without adding a filler post to the topic. That’s a good use for them here (and elsewhere) in my opinion.
I don’t know what to think of them. I just looked at the last 4-5 posts in a thread that were new and none of them had any likes, so I figured no one liked them so I didn’t read them. I know that’s not the right approach, but that was my initial inclination. It feels as if likes indicate whether a post is interesting or amusing.