What if the heart on your own posts is already in the “liked” state by default? Is a permanent self-like more or less confusing than not being able to like your own posts? (reddit for example, defaults a reply with an upvote… which I don’t feel any particular way about. The only difference here would be that you couldn’t remove it).
Removing the heart entirely doesn’t really fly, because the number on its own doesn’t represent anything.
I realise you are trying to make things simpler but i believe taking away the word ‘Likes’ makes it less personal, it means much more to users to see the word LIkes instead of just a number, making it just a number i my opinion is depersonalising the forum, the word likes is unique to the forum and gives it character and a touch of class. thanks.
We had that for a bit and @sam objected strongly to it; I think I agree because it obfuscates which posts you actually liked.
I’ve been having a tough time with this recently; I think the ‘number’ and the ‘heart’ are too close together, and the fact that they’re pressed together into one button-y thing in the interface:
makes it feel super odd, because clicking one half of the button does one thing, while clicking the other half of the button does another. It’s also well below my ‘fat finger’ threshold on mobile, so I end up liking a lot of things I didn’t mean to.
I’m unclear why people are expanding the “see who liked this” so often. I do that maybe, maybe once a day and that’s being generous. Also, use the … button instead if your goal is to expand the likers.
Maybe I’m just nosy but I do it all the time. Many times a day.
I do that quite often, as likes are kind of a reward. The notification system sometimes squashes them together, showing just one notification. But actually there‘s three of them for example.
Admittingly I also read Twitter and FB likes, this shows appreciation and gives a good feeling 
I do that all the time as well. I find it helps me get more “metadata” about the current topic (eg. who helped who, who found that post interesting/useful, who enjoyed that joke).
And I have been having troubles (ie. misliked) with the click target getting smaller. So far I’m not 
this change. I guess I’ll have to teach myself to use the … instead (habits are hard to change)
@HopscotchRemixer one very important thing here to keep in mind is that your community was just deployed with the change yesterday. There is going to be a transition period getting used to it.
When this was first deployed I was like 
post a few rounds of refinement I was at … 2 weeks later I am at 
I am now used to the change, I guess one thing that changed for me is that I don’t expand likes as much. But… I love less text on the screen, that is great. I think that maybe once the change settles in everywhere we can look at some future refinements.
totally agree with this, one solution would be to make more space between the number and heart and another solution would be to reinstate the Like word as it would look more natural.
another thing is i think people will get confused on to which symbol to press, i have been getting confused and i find it annoying when i forget which button is which, i.e. it is not a well defined button.
Yeah that would be a good idea…it would make it look better
How about making the new default a 
Liked posts remains the same filled-with-color (default red) and the own-like becomes filled-with-grey.
Another alternative I played with looks like this:
Just a tiny bit of differentiation goes a long way here.
Not a bad idea what do you think @sam and @awesomerobot
I think icon-heart-empty should be on your own posts though @erlend_sh.
Maybe. I guess I see “heart-empty” as begging to be filled up with unconditional . But as long as there’s a visual difference between the icons I don’t care what’s used where.
And Twitter uses an empty heart that gets filled when you click it.
I agree with what others have said about the number and the heart being too close together. I often want to see who liked a post, and now I often accidentally like (or unlike) a post instead, especially on mobile. Personally, I don’t see what was wrong with the old design.
Click the “…” button, then.
Empty hearts for posts you haven’t liked is now live on Meta
I personally would prefer if it didn’t use the empty heart for the self-likes post, since I’m pretty sure the whole idea of proposing the empty heart was to differentiate the likes indicator from likes button..
Haha, I like how you sneakily introduced the heart button back into all those forums where they switched it to some other icon. On the Asana Forum, for example, there is now the empty heart and when you press it, it becomes a 
… (Not sure the forum admin is very amused, though)
I had to stop and think a moment until I could wrap my head around the different ways of using the filled and empty heart icons.
So the original proposal was:
This is what @notriddle is asking for (right?) and I tend to agree because an empty heart invites me to click and fill it, but I’m not supposed to do that on my own posts. That’s why it makes sense to have the filled grey heart on your own posts.
The logic would then be:
empty heart = posts I have not yet liked but could like
grey heart = posts I have not yet liked and cannot like - or perhaps: which I by definition like but it doesn’t count - aka my own posts
coloured heard = posts I have liked
