I find the Facebook “like” button very confusing and limiting… when someone posts a link to a story about vicious baby-eating crocodiles, and other people come along and “like” the post… what exactly is being liked…the story, or the vicious baby-eating crocodiles?
You see how this might get very messy.
I agree that there can be ambiguity about why people ‘liked’ a post, but I disagree with the conclusions you draw from that. Message boards with a Like feature still have plenty of lively discussions. Non-lurkers aren’t satisfied with just liking or disliking a post; they still want to share their ideas and engage in discussion.
What you do see is a reduction in the ‘Me too’, ‘+1’, and ‘That’ posts. In this sense the signal-to-noise ratio is increased. You also get more feedback from posters that tend to lurk. Personally, I like the idea of lurkers being able to influence the discussion. And judging by the popularity of polls in IMHO, I don’t think I am alone. A poll is really a more complicated form of the Like button.
And while some people might automatically Like a post by a friend, what distortion is introduced? Isn’t it likely that they really do agree with their friend’s post?
Now I will admit that a Dislike button that can automatically hide a post encourages hive-thinking. It also degrades the S/N ratio with posts like: ‘Why is this getting downvoted?’ I personally prefer boards that provide only a Like button and not a Dislike button. It gives a poster feedback when their post resonates with readers without derailing a thread with popularity games. It highlights posts that readers might find particularly insightful.
I also prefer a board that does not track a user’s karma – that is the sum total of their Likes. Karma provides little and encourages gaming and clique upvoting.
I don’t mind that the Dope doesn’t have this feature and I realize that it never will – adding features is not a priority here. But I do get frustrated by the conservative nature that many Dopers exhibit when a new feature is suggested. On a board that can be very tolerant of alternative ideas, it can be surprisingly hostile to alternative ideas about the board.
Whoops…never mind
This mofuga needs text to speech you know what I’m saying? With Auto-tune. Word.
I don’t actually, given that I am capable of understanding context.
A different board I was on a few years ago switched to a system where you could rate posts from 1 to 5 stars, and your average post score would sit below your name on all your posts.
Now… it wasn’t a very intellectual board, and something of an echo chamber. I, being used to GD style posting, familiar with citing and logical fallacies and such, usually provided a much more thought out and - not to brag too much - high quality post. But I had a lot of opinions that ran contrary to the echo chamber. So despite being one of the most valuable members of the boards, my rating was down to like 2.2 stars because people would downrank a post that didn’t conform to the consensus. Meanwhile people that did nothing but repeat stuff they’d heard other people say in various ways would be in the 4.5s. It was just discouraging to me - why was I bothering to create these posts with some thought in them if people disliked them anyway?
And the SDMB needs quality opposition to whatever the majority opinion is. And often people put a lot of work into being that opposition - I wouldn’t want them to be even further discouraged by this sort of mechanism.
Of course a like system is somewhat different than a rating system, and we’d probably be more fair in our use of the system, but I think people would still tend to rate based on how highly a person echoed their opinions rather than the quality of their posts, which threatens to progressively turn this board into more of a hivemind. I see that as a bigger risk than the relatively mild benefits.
Oh, no worries. What doesn’t kill me, and all that. 
You might want to work on your joke-understanding skills.
I could. Or you could tell better jokes.
You only understand that a joke’s a joke when it’s a good joke? Man, that must lead to some ugly situations…
I’m okay with a like button if we can also have a button to mock people who don’t read an entire OP before responding.
