Hot damn, I am under 100 likes away, and it’s only February!
i.e. ([comments] * 3) - [likes] = 95
Of course, for every new comment I have to average 3+ likes to keep knocking it down.
6 Likes
So….how much ya offering? 
Seriously, though, I am curious—do you have specific plans for making posts that will attract more likes? And along with that—I’ve been curious for a while, what exactly makes people click “like” on a post.
2 Likes
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 troll” 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.
15 Likes
Yeah. My most liked comment has no words, and I have another one that has a lot of likes that has literally no content.
5 Likes
My top 6:
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One line rant about American capitalism (with four bullet points). [1]
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One line dig at Mark Frauenfelder’s supplements addiction. [2]
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One line rant about American capitalism. [3]
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One line dig at stupid and vain bank robbers with bonus Snow Crash reference. [4]
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One line dig at the editors’ general obsoletophilia. [5]
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One line rant about American capitalism. [6]
I think I see a pattern!
7 Likes
- One line yoghurt/culture joke
- No line dig at BB layout change
- One line dig at Ted Cruz
- One line dig at Megyn Kelly
- One line dig at Cameron, Osborne and Clegg
- Repost of someone else’s dig at Clarence Thomas
6 Likes
It’s a hell of a hedgehog post.
And I’ll have you know that you may have Princess Penelope Pricklepants, but we, quite independently, have Missy Mona, also known as Princess Pokey-pants.
5 Likes
Aww, she’s so cute in that photo (I have an extra-soft spot for tortoises, they’re really wonderful animals). You should post photos of her in the pet photo thread.
1 Like
1 Funny image I found on Tumblr
2 Webcomic commentary
3 One line commentary on who to really blame for portrait-oriented videos.
4 One line about the usefulness of stats on the BBS.
5 Challenge accepted
6 Webcomic rebuttal
4 Likes
- A one liner about my own privilege
- Pictures of Ted Cruz and Granda Munster
- a one liner about hammers seeking nails
- Hypno-butt
- a one liner comparing BB to Penthouse
- a one liner about crappy coffee
6 Likes
is it the pedantic escalation from bullet points to footnotes?
Because that I approve of.
2 Likes
My top six:
- A badly drawn comic depicting “Nancy” getting mauled by a bear
- A plea for prayers on behalf of a whippet which may or may not have been rebuilt as a cyborg
- A comment about honoring the legacy of a strict Constitutional Constructionist justice by circumventing the Constitutional process for appointing his replacement
- An observation about the insanity of keeping Flying Muslims away from Disneyland
- A note about how enjoying yogurt sex within a committed spousal relationship is apparently somehow more offensive than casual yogurt sex
- The ol’ “Slippery Slope” argument
There might be a pattern buried in there somewhere but if so I can’t quite see it.
6 Likes
One thing you did not mention: posting very early in a topic confers major advantages, simply because less people will scroll down to reply 50, much less reply 300. If your goal is to accrete likes, posting late in a topic is always a bad strategy.
(it does not need to be literally “first!” but in the first two dozen is definitely better)
Examine your own top liked posts and I bet you’ll agree!
8 Likes
No, I should have known. Rat race over here also.
Do what you want, I do mine. Not playing that game, why?
Serious question, why?
[1] Telling Tumblr to get off my lawn
[2] Suggesting that people harassing Arabic speakers are more risk on a plane than the Arabic speakers themselves
[3] Throwaway “elephant in the room” joke
[4] Dad joke about Jews for gun control
[5] Image I saw on Facebook
15-25 likes seems to be about the range where considered comments make way for more populist material.
55 likes, and you were still beaten by @brainspore in the preceding comment. That’s just unfair.
3 Likes
For me, it’s generally that I think the comment adds to the discussion, whether I personally agree with it or not. I don’t like the idea of likes as troops lining up behind a commenter. If it’s mainly a discussion I’m having with one or two other people, it’s often that I think they’re making valid points and I’m interested in continuing the discussion with them. If it’s other people having a one on one discussion, I may like opposing points if I’m learning from the back and forth and I want them to continue. If I’m discussing with one or two people and the likes are dropping off, I take that as a hint that other people aren’t that interested in the conversation - it’s probably best to quit or move to PM if it really matters.
3 Likes
3 Likes
Yeah, well, that ship sailed a loooong time ago.
5 Likes
I think I might finally get a 2:1 ratio in the next couple of weeks.
I believe I actually crossed the 1:1 ratio at about 666 comments and likes! 
1 Like
