I don’t “like” the like on the first post because it is automatically generated. I don’t feel like the author knows or cares that I did it. Compare with liking one of the posts you guys/gals just painstakingly and manually typed in, above. Clearly a labor of love. There’s nothing I enjoy more than slamming “like” on a new post by a new grey-username user that is clearly awesome. Yes more of this please!
I think a better metric for how much the community liked a particular BB topic is:
- how many people visited the associated discussion topic?
- how many people replied?
Now it’s true that this does weight heavily towards controversial political stuff – things that inspire, uh, “spirited” discussion. I don’t know how to reconcile that. (Other than observing that political/controversial posts are often found elsewhere and BB is better off focusing on less mainstream weird/obscure/mutant stuff.) Anyway, the goal of Discourse (and thus BBS) is to encourage fun dinner party type discussions associated with the parent site. Anything else is not really in our wheelhouse.
To be honest I think the best feedback loops for the front page posts probably require front page metrics; how many people viewed the post there? Or even add thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on the main page, though that seems… rather antithetical to the BB philosophy as I understand it. Anyway, by the time someone has clicked “discuss” (or started on BBS) it’s a pretty select (and fucking awesome) audience.
