The trouble with the stroking mechanism is that, unlike the warm fuzzies in the story, the Like value is scarce. If everything is awash in likes there seems to be little positive value for one more, but mostly negative value in only having a few. There is no inherent benefit to the likes apart from differentials signaling attention, or so it seems to me.
I didn't think I would type out "stroking mechanism" this afternoon.
True, but I don't know that "likes" are a one to one match with smiles and greetings. I think the latter actually do trigger a little happy feeling in our brains in a way that likes don't necessarily. That's my sense at least; it seems entirely possible that I simply don't recognize them as such properly. Sort of like if you didn't know what smiling was, so you never realized why people were doing it.
I liked this post just to troll you. Did I truly like it? You'll never know muahaha!
More seriously though, I think in terms of determining whether people really liked a comment, you have to go differentially. A couple likes, meh, that was someone going through and clicking like as a sort of 'I read this' placeholder. A bunch of them? It was probably good.
In terms of actual posts, I generally judge quality by what's written in the comments rather than number of likes.
That's an interesting point about the comments, and it probably applies both in quantity and quality of the comments. It is a small signal if you don't have a ton of readers, but it probably signals a lot by simple engagement.
Is that because you only finish reading things you start out liking, or just generally have really good luck finding things to read, do you think?
The trouble with the stroking mechanism is that, unlike the warm fuzzies in the story, the Like value is scarce. If everything is awash in likes there seems to be little positive value for one more, but mostly negative value in only having a few. There is no inherent benefit to the likes apart from differentials signaling attention, or so it seems to me.
I didn't think I would type out "stroking mechanism" this afternoon.
True, but I don't know that "likes" are a one to one match with smiles and greetings. I think the latter actually do trigger a little happy feeling in our brains in a way that likes don't necessarily. That's my sense at least; it seems entirely possible that I simply don't recognize them as such properly. Sort of like if you didn't know what smiling was, so you never realized why people were doing it.
I liked this post just to troll you. Did I truly like it? You'll never know muahaha!
More seriously though, I think in terms of determining whether people really liked a comment, you have to go differentially. A couple likes, meh, that was someone going through and clicking like as a sort of 'I read this' placeholder. A bunch of them? It was probably good.
In terms of actual posts, I generally judge quality by what's written in the comments rather than number of likes.
See, you totally would :P
That's an interesting point about the comments, and it probably applies both in quantity and quality of the comments. It is a small signal if you don't have a ton of readers, but it probably signals a lot by simple engagement.