"Like" button.

[northern]

Title:
"Like" button.

Area:
entries

Summary:
You could offer something similar to Facebook's "like" button on entries. It would be useful, and might make people feel better.

Description:
I feel kind of embarrassed, asking for this, but several times a day I find myself wanting this feature. I'm scrolling through my reading page, and I see something funny, or noteworthy, but I don't want to make the effort of writing an actual comment. If I did, it would only contain a "yay!" or a "good for you" or an "ahahahah", so I don't see the point.

Hence, a "like" button. It wouldn't have to be a rating thing, or actually labeled "like", but it would be really useful to me, and hopefully to others. People who don't get many comments might also feel like they have more support and attention from their subscribers with something like that. For a lot of people, a comment to their journal is a bright spot of their day.

A con for this function that I can see is that actual comments might drop in frequency. I don't think they would drop much, though. Hmm. I don't see any others, except that I imagine it would take a lot of work to make such a feature. Some people might also think that this makes Dreamwidth look too much like Facebook, or that a "like" implies a rating of the person who wrote the entry.

Poll #4087 "Like" button.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 99

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
44 (44.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
13 (13.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
36 (36.4%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (6.1%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[matgb]

I would rather have no comments at all than a bunch of "like" or "+1"

Which is why I like the idea, essentially. The number of comment notifications I get from suggestions posts that don't display at all in my Gmail inbox because they're duplicate content, because yet another person has said +1 is annoying. A simple button allows people that want to just do that to do so, and reserves commenting for actual substantive comments.

I only ever saw that LJ feature used in suggestions, and it was so poorly implemented I suspect most people never knew it existed, I had to ask someone how to do it, which means the UI was useless, which it was. I think I used it once and then decided it wasn't worth it, ever.

[liv]

I guess I'm not quite seeing why DW should implement what sounds like quite a complicated feature if the main use-case is Suggestions discussions. (I'm not seriously suggesting we should use the old smileys, even now that I know they are still around on DW; I agree with you they were never well implemented.)

[matgb]

Oh, I'd agree, but I'm not sure if it is complicated; LJ appears to be trialling it on some Comms:
http://community.livejournal.com/frankandmeme/
http://community.livejournal.com/lj_photophile/

And seems to have a nice simple implementation, it's definitely keeping track of who clicks and showing a display, but I can't see how it's actually working, nor can I find the Releases or Chagelog when they introduced it :-(