Like vs Message ratio

Well it's his post count I need to worry about but yes, me and Mike have already been ribbing him about that :D
 
Well it's his post count I need to worry about but yes, me and Mike have already been ribbing him about that :D

Yeah, I realised my mistake after I'd posted but didn't want to draw attention to it ... too late now, of course ... :whistle: :D
 
Code:
+-----------------+---------------+------------+-----------------+
| username        | message_count | like_count | like_post_ratio |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+-----------------+
| Grover          |          1428 |        837 |          0.5861 |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+-----------------+

I guess I should talk less. ;)
 
Promoting like/message ratios seems a bit too narcissistic. You would think that it encourages quality over quantity but that's not true. What it really does is encourage self-promotion. The best way to get likes is to attract attention to yourself. It is nothing necessarily to do with quality but rather attention-grabbing attributes like popularity and controversy. Metrics are fine but you have to be careful when making them a primary focus because they can become ends in themselves.

If I wanted to increase my ratio on this forum then I would stop answering some support threads since they yield very few likes relative to political topics for example.
 
Promoting like/message ratios seems a bit too narcissistic. You would think that it encourages quality over quantity but that's not true. What it really does is encourage self-promotion. The best way to get likes is to attract attention to yourself. It is nothing necessarily to do with quality but rather attention-grabbing attributes like popularity and controversy. Metrics are fine but you have to be careful when making them a primary focus because they can become ends in themselves.

If I wanted to increase my ratio on this forum then I would stop answering some support threads since they yield very few likes relative to political topics for example.
I think there may be a small amount of people who do this, but for the most part I believe people like posts because they like the content, find it funny, helpful, educational etc. For myself, I don't take into account who has posted the content that I'm liking, so I'll happily like a post by someone who I would usually find irritating if I believe the post deserves it.

I have never created content specifically to garner likes or atttention either. You could test your theory by resetting your likes to 0 and seeing what happens :D
 
Promoting like/message ratios seems a bit too narcissistic. You would think that it encourages quality over quantity but that's not true. What it really does is encourage self-promotion. The best way to get likes is to attract attention to yourself. It is nothing necessarily to do with quality but rather attention-grabbing attributes like popularity and controversy. Metrics are fine but you have to be careful when making them a primary focus because they can become ends in themselves.

I believe you welcome your likes like the next person Jake :p. So I don't agree that people create content to gain likes or create specific content to gain likes. However, I do think people have the tendency to talk the talk and enjoy the likes they get (can't say myself I focus on likes. If people like what I say, good. If they don't, that is also good.)

What can we do to come to a middle ground here to prove this? :ROFLMAO: I'm willing @Mike and welcome for him to reset my likes back down to zero, heck even my post count that is how much I care.

Heck I would go even further, lets reset our resource ratings? @Mike *nudges* As it's a kind of promotional feature to garner that self promotion, right?
 
If I wanted to increase my ratio on this forum then I would stop answering some support threads since they yield very few likes relative to political topics for example.

That surprises me ... I'd have thought that giving the quality support that you do (including diving onto people's servers to fix the non-XF stuff) would generate many more likes than your general posts. Strange.
 
That surprises me ... I'd have thought that giving the quality support that you do (including diving onto people's servers to fix the non-XF stuff) would generate many more likes than your general posts. Strange.

It's relative. I get about 0 to 2 likes for a support post because it mostly concerns just one person. Whereas in threads like this I get more likes because there are more users participating. My previous post has 3 likes now which is more than I get for a support post. The vast majority of my posts are in response to support queries and my ratio is 0.68, so there you go. It's not a problem for me, just a demonstration of how popularity trumps other considerations when you promote a metric like "like/message" ratio.

This makes me think of SEO and page rank which is very much a popularity contest.
 
If people could choose how many likes they want to give a post then no doubt Jake would be at the top. A support answer is more worth than a joke or a sarcastic response to a matter for example. This likes system is nothing but a tool to engage activity, that's about it.
 
It's relative. I get about 0 to 2 likes for a support post because it mostly concerns just one person. Whereas in threads like this I get more likes because there are more users participating. My previous post has 3 likes now which is more than I get for a support post. The vast majority of my posts are in response to support queries and my ratio is 0.68, so there you go. It's not a problem for me, just a demonstration of how popularity trumps other considerations when you promote a metric like "like/message" ratio.

This makes me think of SEO and page rank which is very much a popularity contest.

Are we visiting reset town?
 
This likes system is nothing but a tool to engage activity, that's about it.

Completely agree. Even with the extended Post Ratings, it only fuels (or attempts to) activity. I take likes/rating with a grain of salt, as well as ratings for resources.
 
I've never seen anything attractive/relevant in "Likes" or message count. I don't even look/think at these things when I post. But yes, some people love it - so be it :)
 
Promoting like/message ratios seems a bit too narcissistic.
No more narcissistic than "promoting" people's birthdays. Kier posted the stats in the first place. I just remembered the post when I saw the new members page.

If we're working toward eliminating narcissism (a noble endeavor, to be sure), we should get rid of the avatars (and profiles and signatures and the like function and probably the "Post New Thread" button too). Just saying.
This makes me think of SEO and page rank which is very much a popularity contest.
For what it's worth, pagerank - the Google thing - doesn't play in to search result ranking, even at Google. And SEO is something site owners do, so I'm not sure I understand how that relates to "popularity."

Your general idea was valid maybe ten or 15 years ago, when the most influential variable in search engine results was incoming links (and the first pages of results were mostly spam). But that was a long time ago.

Pages rank higher in Google search results the more relevant they are. Popularity is an extremely tiny part of the equation. Google is primarily looking for two things; expertise in an area relevant to the search term, original content relevant to the search term.
 
Top Bottom