What I was trying to say tactfully is that it's pretty hard to be a good TB member and ignore this turnout and 60/38 vote split. Furthermore, history is not on the side of those against the Like button. It's clearly been massively successful in a wide range of applications. It's crowdsourcing at its finest.
Saying it can be a tool of trolls or nasty people is a non-sequitur as *posts* can also be a tool of suchlike. We already have the mod system in place. If the content of the post is acceptable according to FT rules and mods have not taken action, liking a certain post should be acceptable as well. If a post is within the rules but has a mean spirit behind it, a post with a nicer spirit should be made by people who are those sorts of people and the likes can proceed apace on each respective post. The bottom line is, any method of communication is simply a reflection of those communicating. We can no more stop mean people by limiting ourselves to morse code than we can by refusing to implement Likes.
The bottom line, IMO, is that Likes are a massively helpful innovation that helps quality content rise to the top (SlickDeals, a similar forum, does an outstanding job with this) via rewarding quality work (through reputation scoring) and via curation. Furthermore, a clear majority of FTers wants it.