I disagree with the entire concept. I would much rather people use their words. But I use plenty of other platforms where likes exist so if that’s your mode of operation, you do you.
Conversations are hard to quantify. Peoples’ reactions to statements are no exception. Doing programmatic quantitation of peoples’ reactions would be possible in this modern AI/ML world, but it would be resource intensive for little-to-no gain.
Having a button people can click when they “like” a post means the forum software can quickly and easily identify posts that standout- it can then use that for a number of things (badges, ranking, etc).
Ultimately, nothing useful is really attained at a personal level. I am not enriched because I have a post with, for example, 27 hearts. In fact, it may detract from the intended experience- I may get an endorphin rush from seeing a post I made is accruing a lot of “likes”; this may condition me to seek more and more leading to an, unfortunately named, condition known as “karma whoring”. Making posts specifically engineered to gain the most “likes”
However, when the aforementioned problem is not prevalent (such as within this community), the accumulation, calculating and analysis of the “likes” on a post allow for automated curation of the forum for new community members getting their bearings and learning the ins-and-outs of the community (this is probably rarely utilized though). For example, certainly a thread containing the highest “likes”/post would be a candidate for “Best Of” collection of threads and I think there’s a way to view the site through that particular filter/lens.
TL;DR: I <3 a lot of posts. Some people don’t <3 any posts. Both are okay. None of it addresses the problem of people wanting to make terse responses.
But I still like to see how people pad their responses; but that’s more me being a people-watcher than “a good reason to keep minimum post length”
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One thing I most often use likes for (probably more so on somewhere like Facebook or Twitter than here, but it works here too) is for when someone replies to me and I don’t have anything to say back, I just don’t want them to think I’ve ignored their reply. Just a quick acknowledgement and thanks/I agree/etc.
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Specifically in PBF games I’m running, I also use it for “I have seen your post/PM and processed your orders, but for whatever reason I’m not making an update post at this moment”.
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This
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That’ll certainly mess with people using custom colors~ (a rare circumstance but not unheard of)
EDIT: Example using the defaultly-available “Dark” theme (configurable per-user in profile settings)
In places like the intro and selfie thread, I don’t necessarily have a comment for every posted intro / picture and I don’t know if it would be a good idea for every existing member to comment on every posted “Hi!” or picture. But I try to like the posts as a way of being friendly. I also just like to like posts in general, though.
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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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