I was poking about my profile dashboard and saw a stats indicator of posts I have liked or posts of mine that have been liked. Both are 0 (not surprisingly) but I’ve never noticed the ability to like posts here. If I had I’d have liked about a bazillion of them. Is it a thing? Was it once and no more? If it is, how does one do it?
It was turned off after the first day or so.
Why doesn’t that surprise me? 
It’d be nice if the stat counter could likewise go away so as not to confuse dumb bunnies like me. 
Like 
A wise decision that was.
Discourse, unfortunately, does not have a “like” feature. What it has instead is a reputation system. Discourse was designed to have its users act as moderators or sorts, so it has trust levels, and higher truest levels basically give users moderator powers. “Likes” factor in to a user’s reputation, which then factors in to their trust level.
We initially tried to set it up so that “likes” would be enabled but we would still be able to limit users to the lower trust levels (we prefer to have our own moderator staff instead of relying on users to self-moderate the board) but we quickly found that “likes” were driving many users up to trust levels beyond what we intended. And of course, the SDMB being what it is, many users immediately started abusing those privileges. 
In order to make the board function the way we intended, we had to disable likes and we had to further tweak the user trust level requirements.
I personally wish we could separate out “likes” from Discourse’s reputation system, but unfortunately Discourse doesn’t work that way.
No complaints from here! It’s just that here, more than most places in my travels on the web, I sincerely do like many many posts. I’ll try and say so in words more often.
I seem to remember that “post-padding” was highly discouraged here in the olden days. There may still be a rule about somewhere. I vaguely remember certain posters getting warnings over making simple mundane repetitive posts. Post count was something that users like to look at and saw status in.
Liking posts was viewed as non-contributory things such as padding posts.
I remember in the earliest days of the board, people would have “post count parties” when they hit some round number.