# What were people thinking during the transition to Discourse?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-people-thinking-during-the-transition-to-discourse/917400
**Category:** About This Message Board
**Created:** [August 6, 2020, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-people-thinking-during-the-transition-to-discourse/917400 "2020-08-06T11:44:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 74

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/codinghorror/32/4242_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2021, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-people-thinking-during-the-transition-to-discourse/917400/74 "2021-02-28T22:25:37Z")

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> [@Northern\_Piper](#):
>
> it’s tied to “community moderation” - the more “Likes” a post gets, the more it is moved to the top of the threads (apologies to @codinghorror if I’ve got that wrong)

Apology accepted, as this is _completely_ wrong 😉 Likes are a step toward building a ‘greatest hits album’, but the only place you’d see that is on your user profile, never in the topic itself.

The generalized concern is that seeing a like count will affect your view of the world, no different than the argument that twitter or facebook should remove likes. And it is a fair argument to make. I think Instagram did actually do that recently? Let me look it up…

> **[Instagram removing likes](https://macpaw.com/how-to/instagram-removing-likes)**
>
> Why, when, and what it will look like

One thing I have noticed that I’d consider a minor unwanted side effect of likes: you do start to notice their conspicuous absence. That is, every post in a topic gets 3-4, 10, maybe 20, maybe 50 likes… then you have a post float in that has ABSOLUTELY ZERO likes. ☢

There’s usually… shall we say… “reasons” that this happens and you’d probably agree with those reasons, too.

If you want a fun take on this, check out Black Mirror episode called “Nosedive”

[![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/R32qWdOWrTo/maxresdefault.jpg "Black Mirror | Nosedive Featurette [HD] | Netflix") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32qWdOWrTo)

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