In 2015 we switched from a discrete line of {x} people liked thisunder the post…
… to moving the smaller phrase {x} likes up near the like button itself.
One additional tweak we discussed at the time, but discarded, is removing the word “likes” as well. I believe here in 2018, a number next to a glyph is widely understood to be how many times that action has been taken:
Obviously this is 2 replies, 4 retweets, and 16 likes… without ever using those actual words.
So in the name of further simplifying the Discourse UI, which is one of our primary goals as a project, we’re removing the repeated word “likes” on every post.
There are a few tweaks we still need to make, but the first iteration of that change is now in effect on meta:
Nice sentiment but it’s bugging me … I think there’s too much spacing between the N and the to make it visually clear that they’re about the same thing.
There are definitely some markets and demographics where assuming familiarity with other products and services such as Facebook and Twitter will work against us.
I’m all for de-cluttering the UI, in another topic we discussed the possibility of removing the word ‘new’ and just leaving the blue dot. For TL1+ users who have been on Discourse for a while that makes perfect sense.
But for new communities still trying to find their feet taking away a lot of these annotations could be pretty harmful. I asked in the other topic as to whether bootstrap mode would be affected and didn’t get a response, here the removal appears to be for all users.
Is there no scope to either tie these UI changes into trust levels (respecting bootstrap) or maintaining the annotations entirely, toggled as a user preference?
Adding a zillion pointless toggles is not a useful exercise, and harms Discourse in the long term. If you want to insert arbitrary text, use CSS customizations to do that on your site.
I would not recommend mucking with this with CSS, you would use a theme component for it which would have a bit of CSS + other stuff and then you could support localization and everything else.
Overall I am ok to live with this for a bit and see what happens.
to make it visually clear that they’re about the same thing.
