Originally Posted by
anabolism
To me, "like" and "helpful" are completely different (hence "like/helpful" makes no sense), because as I see "like" is Facebook-style social media, while "helpful" (as on TripAdvisor or to some extent StackExchange) ranks the post content.
I don't think -- on its own -- whether it's called "like" or "thanks" or "helpful" or "+1" that it matters what we call it.
(Both TA and SE use this as part of a member ranking and badging system, which I think would be a bad idea for FT.)
I agree, that would be a bad idea for FT, at least in any meaningful sense.
We've already got silly names like "evangelist" and "posting legend" from post count, that do nothing of use but also don't seem to do any harm. If it's impractical to use the "helpful" option without having some kind of tracking of it (which I don't find adds any value on other boards I'm on), making it relatively unobtrusive is likely to be enough to keep it from being used to mislead.
As I've said before, I see zero benefit to FT in adding more social media mechanisms.
I think the only benefit, and it's a small but potentially significant one, of a "like" or similar button is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the forum by eliminating responses like, say, "^^^"
I also see a differentiation between conversational forums and informational ones. I also see a problem with very large informational threads that people would like to mine for useful information. It is this view that makes me thing FT could benefit from a mechanism to rank posts that is not part of any reputation system.
It's not clear to me that any forum is entirely informational or conversational; if someone were to restructure the whole frequent flier part so each airline/hotel program had a full wiki and a full knowledge base like Stack Exchange, and a clear discussion board it would be different but I don't think that's on the table or even that it ought to be.