I get ya. I’m not saying you guys were totally unresponsive. I’m saying that approach hadn’t fixed the issue before. If I read the formulas correctly, TL3 would have had 300 likes per day as of this February. I never hit that limit, but it’s certainly easy for a Regular (whose status is based largely upon reading a lot of posts daily) to read a couple hundred comments per hour on a busy site like this. The incremental increases, well-intentioned as they were and applied in good faith as they were, were too low for some users who happen to be very active members of the community, and the logic behind the limitation on Likes may not have been effectively communicated (or simply been disagreed with).
I, myself, knew for quite a while that Liz and Mindy and several other users were frustrated by the Like limit… hence the Waaah thread, the one with 420 comments spanning a year and a half. The low-level grumbling turned into actual troublemaking concern when Liz decided she really didn’t want to put up with the frustration anymore… and we really didn’t want to lose such a valued member of the community over what struck us as a bad limitation. And again, it was not well-understood that this was a variable setting that Rob and Jason et al had control over, rather than a baked-in part of Discourse in general. I don’t know if Jason fixed it in a moment of pique just to shut us up, or as a good-faith response to our (probably annoying) complaints… but the issue is fixed, and nobody’s causing any untoward havoc thereby. I mean, if Like-spamming does become a real and present issue, you’ll let us know, settings will be changed, and the world will continue to spin merrily on its axis.
I do understand that from your perspective, each of those four incremental fixes you listed should have been viewed as positive changes, and yes I do agree that we should be grateful for them. We are. But as it turned out, those changes were too small to effectively eliminate the issue, though each iteration probably shrunk the number of people complaining about the issue by a measurable amount.
Yes, 31,000 Likes per day is more than anyone would ever need. Twenty Likes per minute, twenty-four hours a day? No, that’s not what anyone needed. Somewhere between 300 and 31,000 is where the sweet spot lies. Maybe 1,000 would have been more than enough for a “power user” without causing Like inflation to the point of devaluing the Like by an order of magnitude or so. I don’t know.
But I guess the important thing is that we, as users, are reminded that the Meta category is the best place to register concerns over stuff like this, and that you are reminded that we squawk about stuff like this because we love using your creation so damned much, and we’ve come to rely upon it, and we’re desperate to understand, on those occasions when it doesn’t meet our expectations perfectly, why it doesn’t meet them, since it’s otherwise so good in so many ways.
Thanks for helping improve our understanding.