Seeing comments from (say) three people who explicitly say that they agree or think I’ve done a good work, feels much better than just seeing three upvotes on my comment / post. I know that there are other people who feel the same. Our minds aren’t good at visualizing numbers.
I think that “if you are particularly happy about something, you can indicate this with an explicit comment in addition to the upvote” is a good norm to have. Giving people extra reward for doing particularly good work is good.
That’s a reasonable point. (And I have no inkling why anyone thought you should be downvoted for making it.)
None the less, it seems to me that if you really find an article particularly impressive then you should almost always be able to find something more specific to say than “I like this”, and that a better norm than “if you really like something, post a generic positive comment” would be “if you really like something, post a positive comment saying something about why you like it”. More useful feedback, more discussion fodder, less clutter, and (because of the small extra effort required) I think a better indication of actually having liked something substantially more than usual.
Seeing comments from (say) three people who explicitly say that they agree or think I’ve done a good work, feels much better than just seeing three upvotes on my comment / post. I know that there are other people who feel the same. Our minds aren’t good at visualizing numbers.
I think that “if you are particularly happy about something, you can indicate this with an explicit comment in addition to the upvote” is a good norm to have. Giving people extra reward for doing particularly good work is good.
That’s a reasonable point. (And I have no inkling why anyone thought you should be downvoted for making it.)
None the less, it seems to me that if you really find an article particularly impressive then you should almost always be able to find something more specific to say than “I like this”, and that a better norm than “if you really like something, post a generic positive comment” would be “if you really like something, post a positive comment saying something about why you like it”. More useful feedback, more discussion fodder, less clutter, and (because of the small extra effort required) I think a better indication of actually having liked something substantially more than usual.