Posted by: MURDUR 587
Except that a reply is far more effective than a like.
If someone says something and twenty people quote him then that'll be a far more effective way of saying "The public agree with this person" than him having thousands of likes.
People like frivolously, likes have no meaning, quoting someone on the other hand does.
Not to mention that allowing people to like would actually stifle discussion MORE than disallowing them to like, when people simply quote someone and leave nothing they feel guilty, which is why there are so many posts of people quoting someone they agree and then elaborating on that point.Absolutely disagreed.
When you look at a site like slashdot, you can see how discussions are kept in focus because of the rating that posts receive. Higher rated posts get bumped, pushed up, floated, etc... because people agree with or like it, thus the effectiveness of using a rating option.
Reposting what someone else has said is pointless, distracting, annoying, spammy, contributes nothing new to the discussion, and cannot ever hope to be as effective in the same manner as outlined above. Ironically, yet again, this same kind of reposting has been going on in this very thread; people open the topic, might read the OP, then make a reply based on that alone. There's no way for them to identify what good/bad points have been made to reply to because they're buried pages upon pages deep.
How do you solve that problem with the existing forum setup?