Originally Posted by
halls120
Same here - Milepoint has nice looking software, but is short on content. But I'd rather have valuable content over flashy looks, and I've yet to be convinced FT will be improved by adding a like function.
I certainly would not want to overstate the benefit of a like button; I would use it and find it useful, but I mainly don't see the harm.
On other boards I visit where this feature is in use, I find it to be of no use and that it adds clutter.
How it's presented and thus how much clutter it adds seems to vary a lot between boards. In general, I find it a plus; the only ones I've seen where it's particularly bad are some bbPress ones (which is absolutely terrible software to begin with.)
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
FT user acquisition didn't suffer because Milepoint had this feature and FT didn't. And is the usefulness of this board merely a function of member acquisition counts? I don't think it is at this point, since there is a critical mass here.
It certainly hasn't up until now, and doesn't seem likely to start soon. OTOH, you can only get by on old tech and benign neglect for so long.
I'm sure that the absence of a "like"/"helpful" button has been useful to me.
It's absence has meant that some who want to agree with/thank a post (even if via a +1 or TY) has increased the odds for more discussion than would otherwise take place -- especially as once you start with a "reply" then the odds of there being more content as a result of wanting to like a post increases the likely amount of aggregate content.
I'm not sure that's true or not but
if it were actually the case that starting a "thanks!" reply often actually led to useful content, that would be the counter-argument that would be pretty significant.
I really doubt the software here could support it, but it would be very interesting to do an A/B test on a given forum (someone said BA was most active, so maybe BA) where a randomly-determined half the users were shown the like functionality and half weren't (in order to get a mix of active and less active users), and then the actual content production among the user groups was compared after say, a week.
Given the distribution of very-active vs. less active users here, I suspect even there if you hit someone very active who was grumpy about the feature, in the short term things would suffer (or if you failed to randomly select the grump, you'd lose out on that part of the effect), so it's not perfect data but it would be a good deal better than the supposition we've got now.