Likes do not affect anything outside of the forum statistic on your profile and on your posts, and user notifications if the receiving user opted into that.
The notification portion can be turned off or reduced in frequency in your user settings.
There is no feature on the forum that pits users against each other in terms of statistics. I would hope that there aren’t users who are drawing any meaning out of comparing like values between users.
Give the above, could you indicate what the problem is here that you want us to solve?
I think the main reason people are unhappy is they tend to go into threads and like every single post, which tends to flood notifications or create unneeded noise on the “liked” menu. I see this most on posts at the top of announcements thread or in #development-discussion.
Very good example of this in effect:
Just a question which has generally no value in liking, but visitors come in and like every post in the thread that they reasonably can.
I think that is highly subjective. It’s totally fair for a question like that to get Likes. Probably some of the 10 users liking that post have the same question.
For the notification side of things, it seems trivial to go to your notification settings to turn it down if you are getting too many notifications for your liking.
This setting seems good for your personal use case:
All in all, let’s not put too much weight on the meaning of Likes – they’re just Likes.
The point is that you can’t know what the reason for a Like is, it’s subjective and up to the user how they use them. We’re not going to blanket ban liking posts for visitors nor police Likes for any other reason just because a few users happen to be generous in how they use them.
If you see users who are abusing the forum to create fake statistics on their accounts you can continue to flag that to moderation. For all other problems mentioned here, they can be solved by the recipient tweaking their notification settings.
Marking this as solved to indicate that we are not interested in making changes here at this time for the above reasons.
I asked to confirm and yes you can message one or all moderators and they’ll look into it when they have time.
Going to lock this thread since the request is non-actionable as it doesn’t align with how we see this work in the future, we want all users to be able to post Likes and we expect recipient users to tweak their notification settings as desired. I would strongly recommend revisiting your settings since these notifications do not seem useful if you get that many per day.
