I agree. There have been many times I’ve wanted to express approval of a post, but didn’t want to add inconsequential clutter to a thread. It also feels vaguely Pollyanna-ish to say “Great post!” when everyone else in a thread is being relentlessly combative and disagreeable.
One of the advantages to the Reddit system is that the best answers to factual questions rise to the top. I’ve often felt that something like that is needed here in the GQ forum, where the first answers aren’t always correct, and the best responses are buried way down in the thread. Implementing “likes” in GQ would help to distinguish the higher-quality answers from the WAGs.
I have no idea what “make up opinions of others” means. My point was that people have always resisted change on this board and threatened to leave. Dopers strenuously argued against avatars and inline images, because we’re all about “using our words” and so forth. After the transition to Discourse, many people announced their departure, only to return quietly within a few days or weeks.
Most of the arguments against implementation of “likes” strike me as the same old reflexive resistance to change. Every time this topic came up in the past, it was quickly shut down because vBulletin didn’t have that feature. Now that the feature IS available, we’re seeing how weak the anti-“like” case really is.
It means no one has said they would leave the board over a like button. They simply don’t want one. Hence, you made up an opinion that wasn’t voiced.
You are very mistaken about this. We lost a bunch of posters over the transition to Discourse. Most didn’t even try to switch over, just stopped posting. Pull up a thread from a year ago and see how many posters have a last posting date of June 2020.
One of my issues with likes/dislikes is that it can get skewed so easily. At least it likely wouldn’t happen as rapidly here as it does on bigger boards like Reddit or Imgur. On Reddit my Karma is about 10k, on Imgur I have about 20k points. You get an automatic upvote for each post, but I’ve probably posted less than half of those 10k/20k numbers. It’s just that a few random posts got some traction and accumulated a few thousand points.
Of course, OTOH, maybe likes/dislikes mean more than simple post count.
In any case, what you could do, if people were willing to put in the extra work would be to create a thread called “Like” and one called “Dislike”. If put a link in one of those threads from a post you like/dislike, it’ll say “Like” or “Dislike” under the post.
However, I don’t know how discourse handles multiple people linking the same post in the same thread. Does it just show up once? Multiple times?
I suppose if we really wanted to run with it we 'd have to have some forum full of “Joey_P Likes This” and “Joey_P Dislikes” this threads for each user.
Indeed. Easy enough to say, “Just post +1 or a thumbs-up emoji!” when you know that most people won’t bother to do it. If SDMB threads really were littered with posts like that, I suspect Dopers wouldn’t like it one bit and would be demanding that the moderators intervene to stop it.
I am so tempted to quote, in their entirety no less, every post I even slightly like and respond with a “+1” just to make the point . . . but I’m not an asshole.
I do miss the like button a lot here, I often want to express “hey cool I liked and appreciated your post” and the only way to do that is to clutter the discussion with a reply.
And a reply is fine if you have something add on top of “hey cool I liked and appreciated that post” to add… but often I don’t, I just want to say … “hey cool I liked that post”.
If you like what I said, it’s fine with me if you just smile, and not tell everyone.
Sorry, “Likes” are a pet peeve of mine…
Does no one else think Wanting To Be Liked is the root of all evil? I mean, we had four years of that being a major reason for US policy. Do we need a wall? No, but when I yell about it at rallies, people give me Likes!
Now, I do like that the Giving Thanks aspect of this thread title. A healthier attitude than Likes.
Maybe I just have too many insecure friends who count their Likes and their Points and honestly, one woman quit posting to a site she loved because she couldn’t achieve a particular status (“There’s no Master Level if I get a certain number - - I can’t progress, forget that!”).
To be honest, some of them are ex-friends, because I get to decide who to reconnect with after I’m vaccinated. I think I’ll hang out with less-self-centered people…
OK, maybe you can convince me of how to adjust my attitude.
I went to look at your post history to see how many times you posted the word thanks. Anyone can do this. (Search icon, @username, thanks. . then hit options and sort by latest in the right hand drop down)
For all of 2020 and 2021 so far, there are 20 posts that are shown. Maybe I didn’t catch all of them, but several of them were actually ‘no thanks’ so maybe that will even out. But just using that number, that’s a little over one ‘thanks’ a month.
Just as another reference, in just 2021, I did the same search on myself and found 14 posts. That’s like one a week, and I’ve often thought of adding a thanks but didn’t want to add more to the thread.
If, one day for some reason, you found that your fellow posters made you feel more grateful than once a month, how would you express that? And what would happen if everyone here felt more like their fellow posters were more worthy of thanks on a regular basis?
Yes, I agree with you that thanking someone once a month doesn’t add to slowing down communication. It also doesn’t add to poster appreciation much. My OP was about adding poster appreciation in a way that doesn’t hinder the thread.
Thanks for linking this thread to another one. (Yay to Discourse for alerting me to it!)
I find it telling that you actually commented on a thank you. If it were an every day occurrence, I think people wouldn’t have time to do that.
I also did a search on how many thanks you posted in threads. For all of 2020 and 2021, it was 33 including these posts. On average, that’s a little more than 2 thanks a month. Same question as above. What would you do if there were more posts you felt grateful about? What should others do if they felt like more posts were worthy of thanks?
There were some posters who left in June 2020. But I’m not convinced that many left because they didn’t like Discourse. Certainly not anywhere near the number who said they would. A couple weeks back, I did a search on the word Discourse and then looked at the threads that had something to say about it. Then for every person who was negative about Discourse, I looked to see if they were still posting. Most were still posting. (A few did leave) Ironically, it was those people who said they liked Discourse that are some of the ones who wandered away.
I have a theory about that, but it’s probably a discussion for another thread.
hey cool I liked that post
I also appreciate you sticking around to remove spam. I really liked the shortcut to the drafts link. I have drafts from last November! that I’m still going to post. Thanks for hanging around to answer questions about Discourse. I’d also be happy to see you posting in other places too.
I’ve become a Redditor over the past couple years and I really like upvotes. I also like Likes etc on Facebook and Twitter.
I honestly don’t see how a non-weighted like/dislike button (as in, it doesn’t affect the orders in which replies are shown) would affect anyone’s posting habits. We’re supposed to be some sort of elite, sophisticated group of people sharing ideas on the internet. We’re not children who need upvotes to validate our existence.
It would be nice to show people you appreciate/don’t appreciate their post without having to add a comment 43 posts later, or get yelled at for someone who disagrees with your agreement/disagreement. I’d love to be able to spread more love.
Do you have another reason to explain why so many stopped posting in one month?
Do you think this proves something? In your world does everyone post to a thread about why they are leaving? Very few do that, that’s why the ones that do are ridiculed for flouncing. Most people, last year or not, never say why they stop posting. But if a bunch of people stop posting in the same month we switch to discourse, well, horses not zebras, you know?
How much time does it take? I can type pretty fast so maybe that saves me time. I also post without thinking often and that’s another way to save time, although it probably doesn’t lead to people thanking me very often. But if I felt like saying “thank you” more often I would find the extra 60 seconds a week to do it.
However, I am baffled by this idea that we will have an avalanche of “Thank you” posts for some reason. I’m skeptical that there are that many people hesitating to do it now, or that will suddenly start to do so. I didn’t notice any proposal that would lead to that. Certainly adding a “Like” button, or denying one will have no effect on the number of times people post a ‘Thank you’.
I suppose they all could have decided to leave for separate reasons, or maybe they screwed up during the changeover and now have a “2” attached to their names. That’s six just from one thread. Trust me, there are a lot of people that stopped posting in June 2020.
Some users did not post after the transition to Discourse. They did not post their reasons for leaving, so it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions. I know that some had login issues, and just gave up instead of trying to contact us to sort it out for them. Some may have left because they didn’t like the software change.
As far as “so many” leaving though, the statistics don’t support that at all. If you look at the number of topics created and the number of posts, there was the expected drop while the board was offline (kinda hard to post while the board is down), followed by a huge jump, presumably from a lot of “how the F*** do I do this on here now?” type of posts. Once the dust settled though, posting levels returned to what they had been before the software change.
The statistics for the number of topics and number of posts created doesn’t support any kind of mass exodus. We lost some users, but not many, and not enough to make a significant dent in the number of posts and topics created per day.
I took a closer look at your list. None of these successfully logged in to Discourse at all since the move, so they didn’t leave because of the software. They were never able to log in to Discourse to try the software out. They all likely have login issues.
A couple of them probably have bad email addresses since the system emails going to them have a very high bounce score.
Several of them are using yahoo email addresses. We have had a lot of problems with yahoo filtering off emails (works for some people, not for others), which means they might not be getting the password reset emails.
If anyone on this list (or anyone else for that matter) is having an issue logging in and you can see this message, please contact me at EngineerCompGeek@gmail.com and we’ll get you sorted out.
Sure. It was summer. I’ve noticed that lots of message boards lose people in the summer. There were a lot of people that wandered off in November too. Probably for the holidays.
Maybe not. But that’s the only indication of why someone is leaving is if they post something about it. Any other reason could be coincidence. I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to figure out why some people leave message boards when they do.because maybe like you, I’d like to see more people stay. It’s often confounding.
Lucky you! That always gets me in trouble.
There are at least 3 people who have posted that they held off. If you multiply that across the board, it could be a lot.
Oh, man! That was my thanks for the week. Now I’ll have to wait another week. Hopefully, no one will say anything nice this week.
I appreciate your passion. It’s nice to see that someone cares about people leaving.
I can see ecg posting, so I’m hoping he posts about the stats. [Yes, he did!] Thanks ecg! Here’s the thread he posted about it.
I agree with most of what you said. I suppose we would have to agree what a lot is. I know we got some posters back that had stopped posting because of VBulletin and also got some new users. Whether they offset the losses you would know better than me. I do know we lose posters for a lot of reasons but it’s disheartening to read an old thread and recognize a name and see they stopped posting in June 2020.
Yes, but they all posted up to June 2020 and what happened in June 2020? You can make all the guesses you want about old emails and whatever but the most likely reason is the board change. Like I said, horses not zebras.
Has it been summer all year? Do holidays last all year? These people all stopped posting when the board switch happened. Why did they always return after summer for the last 15-20 years, but not 2020?
No, if we lose a bunch of posters around a certain date, we can ask ourselves what happened around those dates and draw conclusions.
And this has really hijacked this thread. Sorry, mods and Heffalump _and_Roo
Yes, but if the conclusion we draw is that the board should never change because we might lose some posters, I’m skeptical that it’s the right conclusion.
That’s the conclusion you’re drawing if you’re saying that the board shouldn’t change the like feature because people (might have) left when Discourse was implemented.
Thanks for hanging around to answer questions about Discourse. I’d also be happy to see you posting in other places too.