Originally Posted by
kipper
Bragging rights, and yes, some will want them.
I'm not sure fact that some people will want the counters make them valuable. I don't see the harm in them (any more than post count) but I don't really see the gain.
Originally Posted by
HansGolden
It's clearly been massively successful in a wide range of applications. It's crowdsourcing at its finest.
[...]
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.
I'm not sure the format of FT is such that the reputation scoring aspect would work, nor curation to help "quality content rise to the top" -- we are unlikely to ever have a personalization engine (where one's own "likes" can help surface content) and ordering content by likes would open this up to exactly the sort of gaming that people have complained might be possible.
Doing this the way SlickDeals and/or FatWallet do it is exactly what we DON'T want to do.