People are not using the ❤ button

[Viir]

I have been posting dozens of canned replies over the past weeks encouraging people to like posts whenever someone said “thank you” etc but didn’t the post. I can see some results, but overall, I think it could be better.

I cannot make sense of this so far.
If someone replies to a post, writing “thank you”, is this not already an indication that they like the post?
What is the idea here?

Any ideas? Strategies? Similar experiences? Should I stop posting my canned replies to make people aware of the button? Or should I change it?

How about experimenting with it’s visual appearance to make people aware of the button? Should an increased size not help to increase the percentage of people recognizing it?

When it comes to using the button, you could adjust your message to emphasize more on the benefits for the user.

[JagWaugh (Andrew Waugh)]

but mostly it’s a culture thing

Only a few users use the like button on our site. We have >20 character reply, but users seem to prefer to type “I like that (extra characters for the software)” rather than just click the like button.

And some of those who do use the like button tend to binge like.

Meatbags just aren’t always rational.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Meatbags just aren’t always rational

Sometimes it seems like they have minds of their own!

[JagWaugh (Andrew Waugh)]

Sometimes it seems like they have minds of their own!

Who on earth approved that without submitting an RFC?

[notriddle (Michael Howell)]

I cannot make sense of this so far.

If someone replies to a post, writing “thank you”, is this not already an indication that they like the post?

What is the idea here?

You can’t achieve Trust Level 2 without receiving and casting at least one like, and you need even more to get TL3. Discourse itself needs this kind of feedback, and nat-lang posts don’t give it that.

Also, Likes are less noisy than posts. If the problem is that likes are insufficiently noisy, there’s a setting for that.

[jcoates (Joseph Coates)]

I don’t think making the like more noisy for the recipient via notifications would do that much to increase the usage of likes by the subgroup of users that are not casting likes in this case.

Has anyone experimented with making likes more noisy on the topic page itself?

You could simply add some CSS to display “who-liked” by default. Maybe just hitting a button that makes a number go up by one is not enough for your users. Perhaps seeing their avatar put alongside others who have liked the post will make them satisfied with the like button.

[tophee (Christoph)]

Perhaps seeing their avatar put alongside others who have liked the post will make them satisfied with the like button.

I was suspecting the opposite: people don’t want to be registered with their attitude towards a post unless that attitude is sufficiently strong. But your reasoning may well be right.

However, I don’t think your proposed solution can be achieved via CSS because those avatars are not loaded unless you click to display them (saving quite a bit of loading time, I suspect).

(Or maybe I’m just ignorant of what can be done via CSS?)

[notriddle (Michael Howell)]

CSS can’t show information that isn’t provided by the DOM (not really; generated content still ultimately gets derived from either the DOM or the CSS itself).

You could, however, probably do it with a Discourse plugin.

[DeanMarkTaylor (Dean Taylor)]

Just a heads up…

CSS also doesn’t impact the emails going out, here is an example of a heart in the Summary email:

[epitome]

One could award badges of different levels to people who use the like button to give feedback. This way, for starters, people would have a motivation to use the like button. And maybe they will get used to it and do it naturally in the future.

[HAWK]

System generated badges already exist for this.

[dax (Daniela)]

There is a theme component to change with now:

Change the Like icon to

This theme component allows you to change the icon to the icon – or any other font awesome 5.5 glyph you prefer. Since we switched to Font Awesome 5, we built an internal API that delivers a subset of all FA icons to clients – only those icons actively used by Discourse. Site owners can use the svg icon subset site setting to register additional icons for their Discourse instance. Repository https://github.com/discourse/new-like-icon Before [like%20before] [like%20be…

[Berto]

@wiliamjoaquim

I changed the icon as in my forum!

 /*altera botão like */
 .fa-heart:before {
  content: "\f164";
}

button.like:hover {
    color: #31b5b2 !important;
    background: #C6FFCE !important;
    border-radius: 20px;
}

button.has-like {
    color: #31beb1 !important;
}

This stopped working for me. Now it only shows the new non-heart icon after clicking it.

Any fixes? Thanks!

Edit: here we go below!

.fa-heart:before, .fa-heart-o:before {
  content: "\f164";
}

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

The most future-proof way to change the heart button is by using the theme component linked to right above. So scroll up ↑ ↑ ↑