What gives? Why can’t I give likes any anymore? It worked last night.
Likes were turned off at some point.
An uproar was had, apparently. I like likes.
They are still fine-tuning the machine to make it work like the old system as much as possible, I would guess. I have noticed several small changes since we moved in yesterday afternoon, and I suspect there will be a few more.
Images and long-term editing have also been turned off. Smilies, too.
You’re right! Gifs are out 
There was a shift in the planet’s magnetic field, and quite a bit of the Earth’s atmosphere was lost before they were able to resolve the issue and remove the feature. The world nearly ended.
Before you go and tell me ‘likes’ wouldn’t actually be the end of the world, go ahead and read past threads about it and tell me a number of posters here don’t believe that. 
They’re working for me on mobile.
…or after editing my post with a frowning emoji my Gifs was tuned back on…
I see Finn and Jake (with whom I am relatively familiar 
).
I don’t really like them, but I have found them useful. Go to Notifications >> Likes in your profile and there’s a list of all your posts that have gotten likes. Sometimes, they’re really old posts that I’d forgotten about that someone had recently liked.
Sane, rational people would give the Board a few days to settle down and TPTB time to work out some kinks. Then they would carefully explore the new setting, trying out themes and such until they had a handle on things and could make reasoned suggestions. Why, it could be a rebirth of The Straight Dope. A Renaissance, if you will.
Nah.
yes… apparently I edited my post to add an emoji and the gif tuned on (but my emoji is not shown)… confusing developments…
Using the Discourse Classic theme will solve this problem.
I like this part of your post. 
You’re right but… its so uggggs
Now I see emojis again! But I want to claw my eyeballs from their sockets.
Tomayto-tomahtoe.
Nice! One of my all-time fave SNL sketches.
I hope we can have a renewed discussion of “likes” at some point. Sure, the usual suspects will say it’s a popularity contest and we’re intellectuals and use our words and blah blah blah. But we won’t hear “vBulletin doesn’t do that and never will so shut up,” and that’s something. 
I’m all for “fix it now, fiddle with it later”.
If we have a 20 character minimum for post length, likes are an essential offset for that. Some sites have seven different response icons (as with FB).
My preference is for the up/down arrows that ArsTechnica uses in their story comments section: if a posting gets an overwhelmingly negative response, it gets shrunk to a “post hidden” link that can be used to expand it in place.