For context’s sake, there’s already a blog post on how Discourse aims to do better than Twitter:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-community-door/
This doesn’t mention likes, so I’ll mention the big difference between Discourse and Twitter:
- Discourse never sorts users, or posts, by likes. Liking a post doesn’t impact the post’s visibility at all.
- Likes do influence a user’s visibility, by raising rate-limits and unlocking features, but these do not grow without bound. Once you reach twenty, there’s no point in trying to get more.
- The number of likes that a user receives is buried under their profile, and shown alongside a bunch of other numbers, including the number of likes they’ve given.