Like functionality

Well, I wouldn't compare likes with piwik, because the liking is a user-feature and piwik is a feature for the admin. In fact piwik has nothing to do with diaspora itself and should only be set up by the admin, if he/she wants to.

But yeah, I agree that the discussion might be useful.

Agreeing with @jasonrobinson

Don’t take the likes away :((

I’d love comment likes to come back too :))

My 2 cents about likes. If we abandoned likes, I'm pretty sure we get into massive "awesome!", "I like it." or "wow" comments explosion. Moreover, I like the way Facebook utilises likes - giving more liked/commented posts more display. While in most cases it's not needed (a snowball effect + filtering bubble), knowing what's "hot" on the network would be nice.

@macieklozinski I agree with you.

I think that the like functionality as it works now is pretty useless: ok, you can boost the ego of the user who posted the post you like, that's all.

Instead, i'd find it very useful if it could improve a post's visibility. Basically it's (partly) what i suggested in the "Updated Stream" suggestion in another thread.

No..... I hate it when posts which are more 'popular' have more visibility. That's one of the bad Facebook/Reddit/Google type behaviours.

However, one possibility would be to add a stream filter 'Popular posts', which ranked posts according to numbers of likes/comments/reshares, in the way that My Activity ranks by time of most recent activity. I wouldn't mind that, because it wouldn't affect the ranking of posts in other streams.

@goob that's exactly my idea: just an opt in feature or a different stream...

Actually the real popularity of a posting would be something like this
(likes + comments * 2) / (contacts of the user).

Even better would be not to divide by the number of contacts but to take the mathematical distribution of likes for postings of that user in the last months and calculate if the given posting is higher or lower with likes + comments than the average.

But imagine this complex calculation in an sql-statement and how the database would go down with hundreds of requests over huge tables. Ahhh!

I'd say, let the users themselves decide which posting is popular and which isn't by looking at it. But there is still the problem, that some users don't want to see all postings by all their contacts. We could solve that by enabling customized streams for users, so that users could filter some postings tagged with a hashtag #catcontent away. But that is a different discussion and not about likes anymore.

I’d say, let the users themselves decide which posting is popular and which isn’t by looking at it.

Well, I'd say 'Let users decide which post is worth looking at and which isn't by looking at it, regardless of how 'popular' it might be. I think maybe that's your point as well. :-)

@goob It could work as far as you have just few posts to check; if you have many posts you cannot always take the time to check them all before choosing which one is worth reading...

Hey @rasmusfuhse I appreciate the irony of you liking my post saying how much I hate 'likes'! :-)