I feel this a gap as the reactions doesn’t count as likes. This can cause some unexpected issue like if user use only reactions not than automatic trust level reach won’t work. We have some members who doesn’t like to use and always use instead. They can’t reach the trust level 3 by automatically if we use the default trust level settings.
I am not sure the best idea to count it as likes but some kind of count would be nice which can affect to the core values.
Is there any plan to integrate it more to the core?
For now I set the tl2 requires likes given and tl3 requires likes given values to 0.
That is asked at least few times. But my solution was same that you did, but the reason for that was different — calculating likes doesn’t tell anything else than someone is
diligent when giving likes
telling generally liked things to get likes, and that is not same as good or even useful
Yeah I think we should allow multiple reactions in the discourse_reactions_reaction_for_like site setting.
The original reason it’s implemented like this, was to be easily able to avoid negative reactions (, etc) from rewarding topics in a way that likes do, which is a fair concern. With that kind of setup we might start unintentionally prioritizing posts and topics that make a lot of people angry.
If I recall correctly, we also want to someday add the ability to use any emoji as a reaction which would complicate this again… I don’t think we want to qualify every emoji as “positive” or “not positive”… there are a lot of grey areas. I guess maybe we could look at disabling the like impact entirely when reactions are enabled?
What about allowing good emojis and giving the possibility to push up and show love with contributions sharing only cool emotions?
Then could be a plus for every community like an alien or rainbow, that should count as plus (like) by design because we have a flag for bad vibe things.
Counting likes makes sense to me because it’s another dimension of community interactions which is valuable. It can be used to measure the motivation of community participation.
I agreed that the mandatory of likes count in TL system is not ideal enough. But if the user will get score from community activities to level up, I think the like count is a part of those.
than automatic trust level reach won’t work. We have some members who doesn’t like to use 
instead. They can’t reach the trust level 3 by automatically if we use the default trust level settings.
, etc) from rewarding topics in a way that likes do, which is a fair concern. With that kind of setup we might start unintentionally prioritizing posts and topics that make a lot of people angry.