With all the “Like” issues of late, I thought it might be neat to just talk about how “we” like liking things - how “we” use likes.
I know we don’t all use them the same way & finding out how others use them, or impart importance on them, may both shed some light but also give others new ways of (and even appreciation of) using likes.
Ex: I use likes for…
A nod/+1 for a comment I agree with vs a me2 post
To show support for a train of thought / a specific topic by liking all comments about it.
As a “thank you” for liking or commenting to something I said.
As an extra show of support, I’ll go into a Mutants message history & like the last X# of posts across multiple topics.
I particularly like liking posts that have 9, 24 or 49 likes just so that Mutant gets a badge.
Hadn’t thought of this because I ALWAYS RAN OUT OF THEM.
Oh, god, yes!
a. I’ll add that a big lol will get a like
b. I give them to the authors of posts that I found interesting.
c. I also use them to encourage new users and quieter members.
d. I’ll also give a like to a comment I don’t necessarily agree with but is an eloquent or thought-provoking response.
Hmm. I don’t do #2 and #4 (in fact #4 hadn’t even occurred to me), and I sort-of do #3 but not exactly in a quid-pro-quo sense, but more as an acknowledgement. I do like to do #5.
Sometimes I’ll find a rich vein of comments that I’ll dump a bunch of Likes into because I like the back-and-forth discussion therein. If I find a comment particularly pithy or funny or just plain Correct, I’ll Like it. Sometimes I’ll Like a post with which I do not agree, simply because I do like and appreciate the way the wrong opinion is presented or defended.
Still, I’ve been slightly stingy with Likes, since I’ve never run out of them. Part of that is because I only recently got to the point where I read enough posts to make Regular status, and part of it is because I don’t generally frequent some of the more controversial threads, so I don’t spend a lot of Likes reinforcing “my” side of an ideological argument.
But I’m gonna be freer with them now. Sometimes I’ll while away many happy minutes reading without realizing that I haven’t Liked anything in a while.
It is sometimes fun to see who Liked what. I don’t think I often use that peek to decide whether or not I’m going to add my Like. But I will take a moment to think about it, if I find myself Liking a not-particularly-new or -unread post that’s only Liked by users I’ve never heard of. I don’t mind being a lonely voice in the wilderness, but I do try to occasionally keep an eye on the company I keep, argumentatively speaking.
Same here. With all this I’ve run out of Likes business, I tried for a while to step up my Likes, to kind of try to keep up with the spirit of the community, and frankly I found it to be exhausting. I’m aware that I’m a person with a general tendency to defer judgment, and I realized that trying to decide if I liked or didn’t like something, while I was reading, put a burden on my ability to understand what a person was saying and to follow the train of a conversation. So I often read without either commenting or Liking.
That said, I do give Likes, often for comments that bring new info into a discussion whether I agree or not, comments that make me laugh out loud, wordplay and clever associations, and comments that disagree–or perhaps tell someone something they really need to have pointed out to them–in a kind way.
YES!!! It keeps out a lot of similar and repetitive points. I keep thinking of Deke Slayton at the press conference in The Right Stuff, “We’re not saying anything new here. We’re just saying the same things that need to be said again and again with fierce conviction.”
This is slightly off topic (my bad! …but this has been bugging me for a while),
There seems to be some level of agreement on this:
[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:5, topic:81681”] Sometimes I’ll Like a post with which I do not agree, simply because I do like and appreciate the way the wrong opinion is presented or defende
[/quote]
…but for the poster, sometimes it’s a fine line between eloquence and (via PoV)…
I often wonder what we, as a community, can do to foster communication & debate ESP! that we may not agree with as sometimes I fear we devolve into anCT-21-0408 chamber far too quickly, especially on certain topics.
I know & respect that some topics are touchy for some of us so our “eloquence tolerance” is super low. I just think maybe “we” could do a better job- as a community- of resisting the “knee-jerk” and thinking about what someone is trying to say & focus a bit less on how they said it. Not all of us are blessed with great communication skillz. For those that lack good comms privilege, we tend to just stamp them out - even when they are asking a question, as poorly worded as it may be, they get stomped in line quite quickly.
That makes me sad for several reasons:
We lost the chance to educate someone & perhaps change their life for the better.
We hurts their feelz due to a quick sting to ours. We are propagating pain
We all but ensure they won’t want to contribute as often, if ever again.
3a. We, as a community, are poorer because of it. Motoko Kusanagi said it best with: “It’s simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It’s slow death.”
I miss the days when “we” could debate all angles of a topic, just to explore it & understand it better. How do you know if your beliefs hold water if you don’t take them out for a spin & place them under scrutiny once in a while? Now days it seems like it’s just “us v them”, no debate, no discussion, zero appreciation of nuance- it’s black & white, let the grays be damned… that makes me super sad.
Plz keep in mind that I’m totes not singling anyone out, I too suffer from a fail on comm skillz priv - does this make sense to anyone but me?
Same here, and I’m kind of sad to say that I’ve forgone Liking some comments that I thought were insightful, reasonable, informative, etc. Why? Because they were made by certain members who are generally more conservative than this board as a whole skews, who get dogpiled on seemingly just for showing up in a thread and having a differing view from the norm here. I wouldn’t Like any offensive comments, of course, but I would like to throw them some support when they participate in a level-headed and reasonable way—but I’ve seen some knee-jerk responses and flagging here that seem based on who the responder/flagger thinks the person is, rather than on the comment itself, and I’m chicken to be seen to Like a comment, simply because I don’t want to be tarred with the same feather.
heh, I was busy typing that while jamesnsc posted his comment just above.
