New Feature -- Gratitude

[deja]

Liking off-topic posts can give an observer a skewed version of this site. He can see that a poster has been liked a lot, and might easily assume that the poster has much knowledge about go to contibute. Whereas actually the poster may have attained his likability status by writing a particularly controversial post about Emacs or Arizona's immigration laws.

I understand the argument and sympathize to a degree, but I think the idea of guarding against potentially poor information in this fashion is a little too paternalistic for a public forum. I have more likes than Carl (by 1), who is much stronger than me, and none of my likes had anything to do with giving sage advice on playing the game. I don't give such advice because I'm not qualified to do so. There are more than enough qualified people here who give good advice and there's no need for me to muddy the waters. Besides, I have yet to see where bad advice on L19 or GD was left hanging. That's one thing you can set your watch to - give bad advice, run for the hills.

Edit: I couldn't let Carl make me a liar...

[schultz]

I'm all up for letting the community decide what we want the purpose of the "Likes" to be, but if it does become simply a gimmick, I would like to bring back up the option to modify the display of them under the avatars.

Just getting to some of my personal preference here (and see my comment in the other thread with the poll).

[ross]

I see the "like" feature as having exactly one function: to eliminate the "QFT" or "+1" or "I agree" posts that take up more space than is warranted. I don't see it as being some measure of poster quality or poster participation or anything else—it's just a way to give a nice post a thumbs up and save some vertical screen real estate.

[Li Kao]

I'm for either removing the counter or policing its use. If there is a counter than use as in the "KGS is cool" thread should not be possible.

[CarlJung]

I'm for either removing the counter or policing its use. If there is a counter than use as in the "KGS is cool" thread should not be possible.

The problem is that you can't really control how it's used. I don't think any moderator would wan't to enforce any rules on how it should be used. We would get into endless discussions about if a particular "like" was appropriate or not (jfr peoples' endless whining about getting banned for 5mins on kgs). The result is that different people use it for different things and it can't really be used as anything but a fun gimmick.

[CarlJung]

Touché.

[ChradH]

But we like to argue, don't we...

No, we don't!

SCNR

[Joaz Banbeck]

This seems to be old news. Does anyone moind if I un-sticky it? If you do, say so now.

[schultz]

This seems to be old news. Does anyone moind if I un-sticky it? If you do, say so now.

Unsticky away! Got a few other threads I wouldn't mind also seeing unstickied. Where should those requests go?

[RobertJasiek]

Gratitude / Likes / Was Liked is very meaningless to very misleading information because actual usage does not correlate to message quality:

- While well worked out messages written after several hours or days of careful work often do not get gratitude, one line messages with stupid remarks often get gratitude.
- Emotional messages attract gratitude more easily than factual messages.
- Some users do not like the gratitiude tool, do not use it and therefore might be seen to deserve less gratitude in return.
- Different groups of readers have different amounts of favour for the gratitiude tool. Different topics are read with different frequencies. Therefore writers emphasizing different topics of contents get different numbers of gratitiudes.

The best solution is: Drop the gratitude system entirely.

The second best solution is: Allow a user to hide the Likes / Was Liked numbers below his name.

[Li Kao]

While I think that the counters are relatively meaningless, I like the list below the liked post.

[SpongeBob]

For me it is a way to give some feedback about a post that I liked. Nobody has ever claimed that the feature is about the 'factual quality' or such of a post.

It is a nice feature if you take it for what it is.

[RobertJasiek]

But it is not like this because there are also the statistics values in user info and overall lists.

[topazg]

I rather like it. It's a way of appreciating what other people have written. I've appreciated stuff that's clever, witty, informative, insightful, factual, hilarious, interesting, enjoyable, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

The fact so many people use it means it seems to be serving a purpose for many people, and I haven't known anyone to be hurt, offended, or abused by the system, so why would we want to get rid of it?

[deja]

I like it too. Nevertheless, I agree with Robert's "second best solution." Users should be given the choice of displaying the gratitude system under their name. We're given that choice for location, rank, etc.