Ha! So I was actually contemplating starting a thread for people to post comments that got close to getting a badge (9 likes or 24 likes). Certainly not the goal of the likes system, but then check out this thread.
It’s kind of a weird thing. For the most part thinking about how many likes I’m likely to get tends to get me to not post things I think might be redundant or clever, but not clever enough. And that’s generally a really good thing, instead of just piling on in a thread (or doing it as much as I might otherwise), I’ll give often give it a second thought, and the world has been spared a very considerable number of mediocre posts as a result.
But there’s a down side, which is that certain kinds of posts get likes, and very particular kinds of posts get tons of likes, and those are generally those that would make a popular tweet: one or two lines, witty or at least clever, early in the thread, red meat for the expected audience. Or a gif of someone slurping a drink or eating popcorn.
Alternatively, the kinds of posts I come here for, the ones that aren’t just “Trump’s toupee is a war crime!”, but which shed light on an article, add a bit of personal history, or try to tease out a conundrum – those generally do well to get a couple of likes. Certainly when I spend the time to hack out a multi-paragraph discussion piece that I’m really proud of, I know that I’ll be lucky to get one like for it.
But that’s not so bad, because again I feel like I buy those at a cost to my likes ratio, so it really has to be worth it to me to put it out there.
[Update]
Couple of other points.
First, another way to kill your likes ratio is to wind up in a conversation on the BBS, a general long winded back and forth with a particular person. You each write long pieces in response to the other, and pretty much everyone else is just ignoring you, and at best that person is giving you one like for each of your missives. But these are some of the best fun! For me, anyway, I don’t do the whole “waste an afternoon screaming at a trolley” nonsense that some people seem to be into.
Second, I kind of got into this kick about likes and using them to moderate how much I was posting back when BoingBoing (and a bunch of other sites I posted on) were all on Disqus. One big difference between the two was that you didn’t have to have an account to drop likes on Disqus, and the result seemed to be that you easily got double or triple the like totals that you can now hope for on Discourse. A popular post for me here is 20+ likes, whereas on Disqus it could easily be 60. Getting that 3:1 ratio had been pretty easy there, it’s been a hell of a slog here. And I’m not there yet.
