Well, I feel I ought to provide some more substantial reflection on this here Like Strike.
That’s where I start. I seldom run out of likes, so I’m more moved by how the like cap has affected the people I like than me personally.
Which is to say, I’ve made jokes about it. Jokes that usually involve @anon67050589 as the punchline. What can I say, she’s been a great sport about it. So, it killed me when she left. I mean, I feel like I helped drive her away by joking about something that wound up being “not funny” for her. For a jokester like me, it’s my worst nightmare to joke about something that later turns out to be hurtful.
Where was I? I guess is what I’m saying is that I will miss the jokes about the like cap, because they let me share a smile with other goofballs.
Firstly, Donald, I want to thank you for doing the emotionally laborious task of taking something that you’ve grokked intuitively and translating it to The Power. The people who haven’t had the experience to run out of likes don’t have the chance to empathize about what it’s like.
That said, I’d like to extend and embrace your comments by submitting that we need to be careful about how we time-box any “fix.” It’s quite possible for one solution, one cap, to work during a period of time only to be completely unworkable later.
For example, we used to have high rates for long distance calling from landlines, and now many have unlimited cell calling. Twitter had to increase their follower limit, and Facebook had to rework their friend limit.
So, what was good for bbs in 2013 is not necessarily good for bbs in 2016. Indeed, as the lounge has expanded, so I have expanded the likes I spread to new people. Whereas once @Melizmatic was a filthy n00b to be wary of, now she is beloved. Whereas once everyone sparred with @mister44 in public threads about his un-movable gun opinions, now that he’s a regular people have completely adorable discussions with him about ponies and comic-cons and child-rearing. Over time, this bbs community has both grown larger and grown tighter. To those who have ever run over their phone minutes, it should be unsurprising that we’ve run over our like limits. We, as a mutant family, want to communicate more often to more people. Thus, under the constraints of the prior like limit, what we had here was failure to communicate.
In my view, the folks at discourse should be pleased as punch that this platform has evolved into a proper social network, and the folks at b01ng b01ng should be happy as clams that it’s their community who is both passionate enough and growing enough to bust the seams of discourse’s previously desgined constraints. People want to engage more with your platform, your content, and your community. This social graph is pulsating with lifeblood. Talk about wonderful things.
