1. So what if you get likes on both contradictory posts? How is someone supposed to determine which of the 2 is correct? ;) I can think of reasons for like, but trying to determine which is correct isn't amongst them.

2. I'm a bit confused on how +1 doesn't also provide positive feedback. :confused: And I really don't get how +1s 'clutter' a thread. I actually find the post screenshots above w/ Likes & names listed under a post more distracting/taking up real estate than simple scrolling quickly down a thread w/ some +1s. Of course I also hate avatar wildness, which MP has & so far we haven't - having to get past everyone's avatar for every program they belong to when reading a post is a PITA.

Like koko, I'm not set in stone either way on this one. As he mentioned & I agree with, what someone has written is what determines value to me (or not), not whether what someone has written has a gazillion likes or +1s after it. Also I've never depended on someone posting a like or +1 to validate my post/thought or determine if I'm going to continue to contribute to FT, but that's just me.

Cheers.

Whichever has the most likes.

It does, but I rarely do it because it clutters threads.

Empirically all the likes (which I've seen range into the hundreds on "post of the year" quality posts) take up 1/2 inch of vertical space max.

OTOH, each individual +1 takes up a minimum of 1.5 inches of vertical space.

(And 1.5 inches is without quoting, which can lead to confusion with intervening posts. If the full quote is quoted, it can take more than 1.5 inches. Or a [snip] quote can be created keeping it at 1.5 inches, but that takes even more time on the part of the +1'er, providing even more disincentive.)

The bottom line for me is that the positive feedback via a like mechanism is:

1. Easier to do than +1, thus likely to be utilized more often (good for positive feedback)
2. Empirically takes far less space, thus creates less clutter (good for readability)
3. Is more likely to be used because it doesn't create clutter (good for positive feedback)
4. More positive feedback results in more quality content

I might buy into everything you've mentioned, except I disagree that whichever response has the most likes means it's a correct answer. It could be wrong & if you have folk who don't know any better they'd like it blindly. I actually saw that happen in MP a few times (people posting entirely wrong information & people liking the posts :rolleyes:), which is one reason I don't really pay much attention to like.

I'm not set in stone one way or the other on this issue. But I think like supporters are being naive if they think having like will eliminate plus +1s entirely. ;) :p :D

Cheers.

I would "like" your post. I wouldn't "+1" it. :)

Or, on a more serious note, "like" means I think your comment adds value to the discussion, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. "+1" signifies agreement. They are different.

Getting many of my posts "liked" has certainly made me feel good about posting on MilePoint, which in turn incentivized me to post more good information.

Of course, it would be even more motivation--and motivation to visit there more often, as it's been awhile since I've been over there--if I could actually do something with the status points generated by likes, like convert them to miles or something. :p

Both of those arguments have the same underlying idea: because it won't fix every problem perfectly, therefore it shouldn't be done. That's not a line of thinking that's very persuasive with me.

Well, if there's interest in this, we should definitely discuss the term we'd end up using, because different terms do mean different things to different people. If we wanted to get really sophisticated, we could do it BuzzFeed style:
http://i.imgur.com/bRITI30.png

Of course, given the keywords BuzzFeed uses, sophisticated is probably not the right term. :rolleyes:

Obviously the keywords would have to be radically different and carefully thought through. However, things like: correct, incorrect, cool, funny, etc could work. (I took two seconds to think of those; obviously the community could do better.)

If we wanted to go even more free form, people could just type a single word tag into a box. It would then appear under the post. People could click on the word to add their vote to that word as descriptive of the post. I understand the potential for abuse, but I think the same ToS would simply apply. Just because it's one-word communication doesn't change the fact that it's words and the ToS governs.

I'm not proposing the latter two ideas, just throwing them out as brainstorms.

And implying that a simple like will solve everything isn't very persuasive to me. ;)

Some will like like & do it; others won't & will still do +1. To imply that +1 doesn't provide positive feedback is inaccurate. Bit silly to think otherwise. FTers will choose their own methods of providing positive reinforcement, whether it be like, +1, or actually writing in appreciation. @:-)

I can say that even if I vote for like (should we actually get to that stage), I won't be voting for the big yellow thing you've got going there. That's as bad as the gazillion frigging avatars on MP. :p :D

Cheers.

Pretty much sums it up for me as well :)

I should have said this the first time around; I was thinking it, but tried to avoid saying it outright, hoping you'd get the hint and notice what you're doing.

That's a strawman. No one has said 100% of people will never make a +1 post again. What I (and others) have been saying is that a large majority will indeed click "+1" or click "Like" instead of posting a reply with the typed out letters "+1". Also, no one has said typing out +1 does not provide positive feedback.

(Wikipedia: "A straw man or straw person, also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally, is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. This technique has been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly in arguments about highly charged, emotional issues.")

I wouldn't either.

Ah, I need a 'hint' to say what I think & what others have suggested & even an education lesson to boot on what I mean/say. Got it. :rolleyes: Not really a strawman, but you go for it Hans.

Hey, at least we're in agreement on the big ugly yellow thing & hopefully not implementing a gazillion avatars. :D Talk about a waste of real estate ;)

As I mentioned I'm not set one way or the other on this. While I wouldn't find it useful as I usually base my thoughts on what's actually posted & not a +1 or like ;), I know others would like it (pun intended :D).

Cheers.

Sorry, my comment about having hinted was not meant to portray you negatively, but rather the truth is my hint was unclear and I should have been blunt to start with. I had gone back and read my hint and it was far too subtle. As for posting the Wikipedia definition of strawman, I'm sure you already knew what strawman meant, but I've found a surprising number of people don't know what it means, so I just wanted to be clear on its meaning: it's about the argument, not about the person.

I'm delighted you're against wasting real estate!! :D:D;):D

why not reformat to - "these people agree with this post" and not having any numbers or counters or statistics

Amazon Has A Similar Approach for Reviews
 

Amazon allows readers to indicate whether a review was helpful, thus allowing users to sift through the bulk of reviews to focus on comments that others found helpful. A think a similar mechanism here would enhance the utility of FT.

As an Amazon user, I find that a very easy system to use, as well as useful when choosing reviews to read. I suspect it's easier to implement on VB, and it takes up very little space.

If a ratings system is to be plemented, maybe this is the one besteetimg the KISS criterion and may be the least susceptible to abuse as well.

I think a rating system for posts would greatly enhance FT's value and also streamline some of the more debated threads; so it would be even better, in my view, to vote up and down each post, such as in some disquus fora.

This would be a somewhat gentle way of saying, without censoring, that the community agree / does not agree with what someone is saying, and I believe it would abbreviate some more "stubborn" discussions.

Amazon has an indirect way to to this, geared to their circumstances, as they push to the forefront the reviews that are more helpfull (this would not be directly possible here) and even, in the discussions that follow, they put as out-of-view a post that had been massively down voted.

Tom911 is mostly correct. There were actually two rating systems, one for "Reputation" which applied to particular posts and the other for forums.

Both of these systems were badly abused by an immature group of people who used them to gang up on people they did not like.

Where he is wrong is in saying "the whole system was anonymous". That was true in the beginning but Randy then changed the system (in so far as "Reputation" was concerned) and did so retroactively. At that point, the abuse stopped.

I have absolutely no problem with the OP's suggestion as long as it is not anonymous.

Popularity contests, gotta luv 'em. ;)

The "abuse" didn't stop even when the founder of FT did the "de-anonymous" thing after the "reputation" feature was turned on and used in ways that some of its fans didn't anticipate.

If +1 means Agree, then use the word Agree.

I wonder if we could have separate icons for Thanks and Agree?

Helpful is more precise than Thanks, so I "like" that. ;)

Being able to filter on Helpfulness would probably be very hard for vBulletin, but you never know for sure unless you ask.

I'm leaning toward asking IB what it would take to implement separate icons for Agree and for Helpful. (Or use Thanks for Helpful if Amazon has some legal monopoly on that term.) Second I would like to ask whether filtering posts on Helpful rating would be feasible.

If people used the Wiki feature more often, filtering might not be necessary. On the other hand, filtering would be a great tool for people looking for the best content to add to a Wiki.

I like both ideas either of a disquus type up/down vote (I think FW also has something similar?), or the Amazon-type helpful rating. Maybe the Amazon approach would have more actual utility - I like it on Amazon, at least. Particularly if one could sort by helpful rating in some manner.

I don't particularly like <rimshot> the MilePoint "like" system. Of course I do use it since it's what they have, but I'm not sure it adds as much value as a couple of the other ideas above. It ties into the "status" system on MP, which again is of questionable value - I wouldn't want to see that setup here on FT, personally.

Please turn on this feature!

There are threads like this one that need this option:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hertz...s-only-12.html

And this one:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hotel...elzoo-etc.html

We need to be able to say thank you without adding to the clutter. It will encourage more people to contribute.

And to the many who have posted in this thread it has no value to them, what harm is it? You can ignore it, and ignore it easier than all the "thank you" posts.

Ha ok so this is one thread with one too many "like" gags but that won't stop me stringing it along...

.... I do think FT seriously, seriously needs some way to better differentiate contributors than post count. I am frustrated by certain posted with "evangelist" status who make posts that are 100% factually incorrect. Of course I won't name names, but there are some folks here who have over 10k posts and will come into a discussion and make a statement as if it's complete fact and I just know it's wrong. I need a way to thumbs down these people, and people need to be able to thumbs up the people who make genuinely useful contributions. I don't think "liking" individual posts does anything to fix that unless likes gets linked to some overall score but I think something along the lines of SlickDeals rep system could be very helpful here to distinguish those who just post endless junk.

+1

Some sort of post rating functionality has been needed for a long, long time. The typical response is that it was tried once and failed due to gaming, or that vBulletin doesn't support a different form of rating.

I think it's past time to assemble our wish list of what this feature should look like, then just ask IB to implement it. They've been really great at accommodating our reasonable requests recently.

I'd like to see our new TalkBoard grab this subject and run with it.

Glad to see some agreement on my suggestions. In fact if we go back to the long and painful process of getting wiki's implemented one can come to the same conclusion each time - SlickDeals and FatWallet already have the right model so why reinvent the wheel? Both those sites have all the features we discuss here and are all the better for it (a rep system in this instance - I think SD has a much better system than FW in this instance, they both had wiki's long before FT gave up much of that content to blogs)

{Discussion of moderation removed per board rules. Outside of TalkBoard purvey. Please contact the Community Director if you have feedback on the subject. Also not germane to the thread topic.}

With the recent addition of the "Breaking News" alert button at the bottom of each post, I figure that Internet Brands has once again shown us that new features can be implemented if the desire is there. So I would like to reopen the "Like" topic for discussion.

I think a "Thanks" button or similar indicator of the value of a post (whether information or amusement) would improve the reading experience on FlyerTalk.

Ideally the forum software would allow filtering on the up-rating count, so that the "Thanks" button would be in effect a "Be sure to read this post" button. Even without software filtering, people who are pressed for time could learn to visually skim a thread for highly rated posts to read.

This feature is worth at least as much as the recent News button. With a little more programming it even has the potential to identify valuable posts that are somehow not flagged as Breaking News by readers.

Folks, we have kicked this idea around ineffectually for close to a decade. That's an eternity in Internet time.

I'm all in favor of taking some time to refine the idea and get IB's advice on implementation constraints, but then:

Oh good grief. You make it sound as though FTers have been clamoring for this for a decade when FB barely got started back then.

The other - and quite frankly more important thing - is that FTers themselves are split pretty evenly on whether they want like, so your red comment doesn't really apply. We encountered that with the titles issue. A fter saying do something when each time the topic was brought up FTers were equally split on whether they wanted it or not, and that's how the vote went.

As a TB member I'm willing to keep an open mind. As a fter I'm against like for the reasons I outlined earlier in this thread. Besides not wanting to read a gazillion like a one person saying a post has value or is correct doesn't' t make it so.

Ps -the news button is a trial at this point and only available to mods and a few long time FTers and TB members. Because of that I'm quite surprised you'd bring it up publicly. For others who Don't fit into the category of FTers currently granted access for the trial bit are now wondering why it is, it's basically a button that allows you to alert IB to a thread that you think is newsworthy and should be considered for news on FT' s home page. It's made clear it should be something newsworthy. Right now there are hiccups such as where it's positioned, etc, and there may be changes etc, so nsx basically jumped the boat by bringing it up.

Cheers

Working backwards:

That's what I get for speed reading. I didn't realize the News button was limited. My point was that IB can implement what TB asks for, within reason.

The Thanks feature would just show a count and possibly a truncated list of members taking less than a full line of screen in small font. That's the cost of the feature. The benefit to readers is faster skimming and for evaluating the credibility of the information. A speculative benefit is more high-value posts. IMHO the benefits outweigh the cost, making this feature worth the effort to try out.

The TB had no problem ending the first experiment (long ago) when it failed. We should do a better job designing a feature and then see how it works.

And there's the problem. Just because someone says like or thanks doesn't' t make a post credible. The information could be wrong and you could still get likes and thanks. I've seen that on other BBs and just shake my head. And what if you have 2posts that contradict each other but both get likes/thanks.

Also TB neither implemented nor killed the rating feature years ago. Randy did.

Evidently Ib has been working on news concept for a while and not in response to a TB request.

Speaking only for myself I'd much rather they put their efforts into a decent mobile app given how many people now access websites, bbs that way, vs doing news or like. Having a decent mobile app would benefit more of our 500,000 members than news or like.

Ok I'm off to bed for the night.

Cheers.

+1

Now if I only had a Thanks button for that post! ;)

How about the Yelp review model?

Below every Yelp review, there are three buttons:

Was this review …?

Useful / Funny / Cool

On FlyerTalk, perhaps one of them could be labeled "Accurate"?

The Like/ThumbsUp button works for some other small social interaction sites like say... Facebook. Oh and it works very well on what I think is the by far superior (at least technically if not on content) SlickDeals.

Yes FT needs an app too.

Over at VFT I give and get 'Danke' all the time:

http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/853/9641932957.jpg
View Screen Capture

Don't ask me what benefit it has though. :p

:D :D

Where is the button for this new addition? :confused:

Thanks for the answer, Sharon! :)

The reality is IB implements what IB wants, whether within reason/TB requests or not.

The sad truth is certain improvement, such as FT Premium and some functional mobile apps, has long been put on hold or ignored by IB. :(

Amen!

I agree even if there is a like button, so it's not going to eliminate a perceived problem.

Correct and a VERY wise decision he made. @:-)

He kicked a lot of heads in the process for being jackasses, and abusing it terribly, and as many of those same souls are still active here today, have no doubt history would repeat itself here.

No-one here or on TB in a majority wants avatars, or even agreed on changing the 16 year old member descriptors past the totally lame "Evangelist" etc - and that is where FT heads are at. "Lets keep things just like they were in 1998 ... no harm there - that nice Bill Clinton fellow will do ME just dandy for President, have a nice day."

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/town-...ostcounts.html

I do like the like buttons, but I don't see any real benefit. If it was to be used for trip reports, it could work but then somehow the best TR always find a way to come to the first page time and time again.
I can see on the other travel site *cough* MP *cough* their like/thanks system is there, but basically useless as there are threads where everyone likes each other posts.

That's because Likes feed a reputation index there. If we don't have any reputation index then gaming Likes will have no wider benefit.

So then what would be the plan? in a subforum do sort by likes?
Or in a popular thread, place the X most liked/thanked posts at the top?

To start with, just display the Like count per thread and let readers visually scan for highly rated threads. We might as well take this one step at a time. There's less chance of an unpleasant surprise that way.

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