I didn’t mean to spark a debate about using likes. Not least because we already had that debate on that forum and I already have a perfectly good sense of why people who like 'em like 'em. I just don’t. 
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I see likes as the online equivalent to body language. If someone says something IRL that makes you laugh or smile, that reaction conveys important information even if there aren’t words to go along with that reaction, and having an analog in an online setting makes things feel more natural to me.
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This is my thought on it as well. I will use likes either because I really agree with what the person is saying, but have nothing more involved to add, or the post made me smile or laugh. A quick like is a simple way for me to express my appreciation of the post without posting something like “LOL”.
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What can I say… I love love (:
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I often have nothing significant to add but want to do more than click the heart button. I like how in Discord and a lot of other modern chat apps you can respond with a number of different emojis; certainly that would be quite a bit more complicated (and perhaps visually-noisy), but I think it would go quite a bit further than the simple 
.
Well, you can always reply with one or more emojis rather than words.
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I feel like if you can’t just click like and want to agree with a post, it spurs you to think of more to say, whereas conversation just kind of dies when likes are applied instead. I also value people taking time and effort to express that agreement or support a lot more than a counter going up, and I find that I usually don’t even notice when that counter does go up after the first notification. And people talk about how they use likes, but the actual like function doesn’t inherently convey any of that, so unless you provide that context, how is anyone to know?
But also I am an old fuddy duddy grumpus, so, y’know.
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is of course now “virus transmitter”, at least in this symbol set.
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I’m sorry but when someone mentions a ‘Community’ affected by Karma Whoring I can’t help but think of MeowMeowBeenz
As for the minimum length of a post I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever used less than 20 characters; which is partly due to the fact that from an aesthetic point of view I don’t care for short posts.
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Wow. I was completely unaware of this, having lost interest in Community somewhere in Season 3 (which is fairly good for a show, honestly; TV’s not really my thing)
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I gotta say, one of my favourite things about this forum is the creative and extraordinarily frustrated add-ons to replies like ‘Yep’ to make twenty characters.
As for likes, I’m in the middle. I do count likes, and it depresses me when it seems like my contribution is not as appreciated. I can become a little too desperate for affirmation, and it’s the reason I don’t participate in normal social media in the first place.
But I do enjoy liking other people’s posts. Sometimes I don’t have anything constructive to say other than ‘I like that’. The convenience of a button push ‘good job’ is attractive. It’s a pretty shallow interaction though - ‘I just birth’d a baby’ and ‘I just ate a sandwich’ can get the same amount of likes, depending on visibility/thread activity. I don’t know if this is possible, but could there be more buttons? A ‘like’, ‘love’ ‘laugh’ kinda system?
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I used to like likes until I learned that they were being used by pernicious unscrupulous AI programmers as convenient binary quantifiable summaries of individuals’ thought processes to be used in crude algorithms designed to deliver manipulative messages. Then I didn’t like them at all.
I still like them if they’re simply no more than convenient quick signifiers like a nod or eye contact in an actual face-to-face conversation. But not otherwise.
So I guess the key question is: @RogerBW, what sort of contract do you have with Cambridge Analytica regarding this place?
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(Just so you know, I resisted the urge to abuse my awesome mod powers to redact your message in the name of comedy)
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Well, bear in mind that as far as you’re concerned I’m just some guy on the Internet so everything I say may be lies.
But a lot of the time I feel like the guy with crazy hair and twigs in his beard saying “X [common everyday thing] is evil, it’s spying on you”. Except I keep being proved to be right.
I don’t have a Twitter or a Facebook account. I have a Google one, but only because I needed it for using Hangouts before Jitsi came along; I don’t use it for anything else. I don’t comment on the main SU&SD site because of the privacy implications of Disqus and Discord. I was using PGP when it was still illegal to export it from the USA. I was at ECFP '93 when the man from the Home Office said that the Data Protection Act was the worst-drafted piece of legislation he had ever seen.
So yeah. That’s not to say that if I got offered eleventy billion quid I wouldn’t sell you all out, but I like to think I wouldn’t.
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Hi five to the only other person I know who uses jitsi!
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I’d heard of Zoom before two months ago, and none of it was good.
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I’m prohibited from joining a Zoom meeting using my company-provided laptop; even if we’re working with a customer and the customer wants us to join their Zoom-hosted meeting.
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