at the risk of making a “derailing” post, why is it necessary to give only 10~ minutes for undoing a like or even having a time limit on unliking at all?
@Falcor if this reply is too much of a derailment feel free to remove it.
I have moved this here, as it’s a valid discussion. Cheers, @navarro
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Also worth noting that once the 10 minutes or so is up, a “liked” post can then be edited to say something different and the likes stay
EDIT: Everyone who “likes” this post is a nazi and kills babies
EDIT THE SECOND: 4 people “lied” after the first edit… hmm…
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Don’t tempt me…
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Ooooh…never thought of that. That is a flaw in the system, definitely.
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A lot of weird, subtle, exploity edge case griefing situations are allowed by unlimited undo windows. And even worse they are basically invisible. I know this from getting badly burned by them in the past…
@falcor the workaround is to delete the post, then undelete it. I already did this for the post in question @daneel.
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but now people are getting burned by my post above in this thread. Unless @ChuckV, @anon67050589 , @anon61221983 and @navarro really are baby killing nazis 
In seriousness though, the workaround you suggest would delete legitimate “likes” too, surely?
Actually, I liked post-edit.
My secret’s out now. I feel so liberated.
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How about a substantially longer window like a week or so?
And I think it might make sense to remove likes after late edits (later than after no more than a few hours).
This simply isn’t a frequent problem, e.g. this is the first “accident” that has been reported of consequence. And I have yet to see a user edit their post in the manner above. (for the record you could do the same thing on the internet, make an URL that supports gun control, then after a bunch of people link to it, change it to a virulently anti gun control rant…)
It’s like the old stories of razor blades in halloween apples – shouldn’t we try to verify this is a practical problem before making a bunch of weird, unsafe, drastic changes?
Anyway, there is the workaround, delete the post, then undelete it.
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Good to know. Cheers.
Sorry, those were simple harmless suggestions. Earlier feedback on Discourse may have shown you that “weird” can be be rather subjective. Unsafe? I know you said so, but I am still not quite sure what those risks are supposed to be.
Sometimes you can get awfully defensive when someone isn’t quite as satisfied with your work as you are.
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Sorry, didn’t mean to be.
Background reading:
http://blog.codinghorror.com/rate-limiting-and-velocity-checking/
http://blog.codinghorror.com/designing-for-evil/
Some of this game theory stuff isn’t intuitive until you play the game as a player whose only goal is to maximize pain and suffering for all the other players, and has infinite time. I like to design for safety at the outset.
That said, if you have read the above two articles, and believe you have correctly predicted all the risks, I’m all 
s.
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Or after any edit. If the post is changed, all of the “likes” are referring to something else.
Bit harsh for those of us who are typo-prone and like to tody tidy up afterwards, though.
Edit: Bugger. Typical. 
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Well, more incentive to get it right the first time. I’ve made posts that garnered a few likes, even though I’ve made a egregious error, and I resisted the temptation to correct those posts.
I sometimes “like” posts that have errors in them (that sounds weird, sometimes quoting the section comprising of the errors, but I just comment without drawing attention to it.
If I can get my corrections in before anyone likes my post, great. That should be the time limit: until somebody “likes” or replies. After that, if you change it, the responders were referring to something else.
I think it’s basic to wipe out all “likes” when a post changes.
And let’s not forget that when a post was “liked”, it was with flaws and all.
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Or less incenticve to kerect them? 
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My 2 cents: Neither the like editing nor the comment editing windows of time need to be unlimited/indefinite, both can have practical limitations, a very sane approach would be to allow them both to be editable until the commenting for the post/article has closed. Another very sane approach would be to make the like editing window twice the length of the comment editing window. Either would allow for practical limitations and wouldn’t break the internet and shouldn’t bring about a game-theory-pocalypse. just my thoughts as a fellow developer.
also, while fixing this would be swell, i don’t see it as a deal breaker. likes are just pats on the back for fun, you can like anything for any reason, and who really cares or knows why you liked it, does it really matter? is anyone really judging people for liking things?
Probably not. It’s absolutely meaningless as a way of judging the worth of either a post or poster.
But who doesn’t like a little positive reinforcement, even if it’s only for fun. And it does help cut down on
“+1” posts, so there’s that.
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