What is the purpose of likes and trophies? And this seeming fascination with replicating Facebook

[LFC_SL]

Hi people

Not sure if this should go in the Suggestions forum, feel free to move By way of background filling in I will quote a portion of my first ever post (from the infraction system development thread):

I am a moderator on a large UK based forum where the site owner is prospectively looking to change to xenForo from VB

I am informed some of the design decisions made in the development of XF is in recognition of the way social media sites are embedded into internet culture in 2010. That is perfectly fine and understandable. It makes good business and personal sense to recognise the importance of such platforms

But nevertheless social media platforms and discussion forums have different emphasis, even if the ultimate mutual aim is to stimulate communication and sharing of information. On social media sites you mostly communicate with people you personally know. It does not necessarily follow when buying from an online trading forum, discussing the latest Petrof piano or the merits of the latest ATI vs Nvidia GPU, one would wish to see or share a personalised avatar and such details found on FB (in part reference XF will produce a blank image if no avatar is selected...)

On the forum I come from the "Thanks" system is employed. Essentially XF's replication of FB "Likes" is merely a change of label. Some VB forums use the reputation system where members can build up a series of green coloured boxes Seeing now XF uses Trophies I have a few points and questions

Like or Thanks can get tricky in my view. A helpful and informative post, yes hit the button. But then on occasion people will acknowledge a post when really a "LOL" button would be more appropriate. So then Thanks or Like will over time loses impact and/or not be an accurate representation of the helpfulness of a member. OK no need to focus on it, it's just a sideline if you will. A member with 10 posts versus someone with 1000 should be seen to be able to be equally helpful; let's not focus on 10 likes or 1000 likes. And I guess you are never going to get a system which is truly representative of who is helpful and who is a comedian and a few people appreciated their moment of wit! Just wanted to get that off my mind

Moving on to XF Trophies, what is the purpose? This really is where my argument about the difference between a forum and FB comes in. Will it encourage helpful posts or people to return? Probably irrelevant to that aim so why have it? Will you get "spam" posts where people treat it like a game? Maybe. What happened to posting as you feel a part of the community and want it to grow?

Now I fully respect that everyone behind XF know more about web and forum design than I ever will and were involved with the success of VB before the takeover. At the risk of being criticised though, I hesitate to say VB became a popular platform for a reason. It never had to be a FB clone or a social media site clone and XF should not need to be that either. Recognise the emergence of such sites yes, but I am perplexed by the necessity of some of these "social" elements in XF

P.S. My opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by my site owner

P.P.S. I am fully behind choosing an avatar and utilise one on every forum I frequent but it cannot be too much to remove the need for an empty box if none is selected?

 

[Kim]

I am pretty sure if you just start using this site ... you will get it

The Trophies and Like system actively encourages posting - far more than any reputation system ever has on any forum software.

It's a new era, I know change is scary, I personally have thought all the same things you have expressed above in the not too distant past, but I was wrong... it took actually seeing what these modern implimentations look like and do to actually open my eyes and realise that a lot of my concerns were just my dislike of change.

Don't want to use a photo in your avatar? Neither did I at first, it's fine not to, no one cares either way.
Don't want to like posts.. then don't.
Don't want to post to Facebook or Twitter from your forum.. then don't, but your members will love it and it will keep them coming back for more.


I could go on, but really as I said, spend some time here and I am sure you will understand the beauty of it a lot more

 

[LFC_SL]

I am sure I can get used to anything and my site owner is intending to convert soon enough. And I do love that search box. I just want to understand some of these thought processes as I am informed this is still the development stage and all opinions may influence

 

[Kim]

I am sure I can get used to anything and my site owner is intending to convert soon enough. And I do love that search box. I just want to understand some of these thought processes as I am informed this is still the development stage and all opinions may influence

I think the design and feature set is more or less set now, other than tweaks and improvements, but I can say with some certainty they are not suddenly going to say.. let's all go party like it's 1999 again, and copy the old skool forum software

They have brought forum Software into this century, it really is lovely to use, very intuitive, sleek, and sexy.

Your concern about post counts etc.. have you noticed they play a very small part here.. you have to actually seek out that information, so in effect you have answered your own concern.. you don't know without looking if I or anyone else when answering you here, have 3 posts or 3000 .. it doesn't and shouldn't matter is the whole point.. what matters is the quality of the interaction we have.

Xenforo has stripped out all that useless crud, and whilst it is still there, you have to go looking for it if it is important to you, as a result the quality of interaction actually improves from my experience here.

 

[Jethro]

I am sure I can get used to anything and my site owner is intending to convert soon enough. And I do love that search box. I just want to understand some of these thought processes as I am informed this is still the development stage and all opinions may influence

For sure the folk here at Xen are listen to all reasonable suggestions and there is a healthy debate on each one.

I think the philosophy behind the various nifty features of Xen is to encourage your site members to post more often than they might do currently with existing forum packages. I use Invision and wasn't even aware it had a similar feature to the "Like" that Xen uses, at both the Invision sites I frequent no one actually uses it. I'm pretty sure the "Like" option is going to get a pretty good work out when we convert.