+1 or Thumbs Up buttons

May 24, 2012 10:45 AM

I would like to request a feature to distinguish favorites (answers/posts I want to go back and read) vs "promotes" (ability to vote for a post/answer without adding a "nthing" comment).

I am sure this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find it in this section, whole of MetaTalk or in the FAQs - is there some way or on-going feature request for separating out the favorites vs "promoting" posts/answers? Some sort of +1/Like/Thumbs Up button?

There are some answers/posts that I want to keep track of and re-read later, but there are also posts that I want to "promote" without adding a "nthing" comment unnecessarily.

I would like to see only the posts I want to re-read show up in my favorites link.

posted by theobserver to Feature Requests at 10:45 AM (67 comments total)

Given the entire community attitude towards "promotes", it doesn't seem like this is going to happen.

The only solution is to use MeFi favorites as bookmarks, and to actually comment in a thread as a form of "thumbs up" or promotion. Or don't comment.

You could also use an online bookmarking service to keep track of posts you like.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:48 AM on May 24, 2012

Everyone uses favorites differently. It is unlikely that there will be changes to how they are implemented.
/paraphrasing several old discussions
posted by inigo2 at 10:56 AM on May 24, 2012

Yeah, no we're not going to be adding a feature like this. When we launched and planned and iterated favorites, we specifically did it to make the feature vague in its use so it could be all things to all people and specifically stayed away from thumbs up/down or rating systems because those are fraught with problems. We've got our own issues to deal with as a result of favorites, but they are staying as they are.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:57 AM on May 24, 2012 [4 favorites]

Not something we plan to do, no. The favorites system is intentionally pretty minimal by design, and something we consider a "use it however you like" sort of feature. If you need to get more granular about how you manage favorites/bookmarks, the best option is to pursue a third-party bookmarking solution to add whatever modality you need to your bookmarks vs. your "i like this/i think this is good/i agree with this" annotations.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:58 AM on May 24, 2012 [2 favorites]

It's a pony I would ride, but it's been discussed many times in the past and solidly rejected.
posted by Jpfed at 10:59 AM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

We've got our own issues to deal with as a result of favorites, but they are staying as they are.

It would be interesting to hear more about this. I've seen jessamyn mention this in passing from time to time, but I don't have a clear understanding of why the current favorites feature is problematic.

Of course, I can guess why the mods may have issues with MetaFilter's favorites feature, but it would be interesting to hear generally what problems it causes.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:10 AM on May 24, 2012

This has come up many times. The answer is always "no".

Metafilter is not Digg. (Thank goodness.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:11 AM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think we should implement every one of these snowflake "my favorites have a different meaning to yours" so we have like fifteen different dimensions of scoring. Then we can all be winners.
posted by Plutor at 11:20 AM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

Let us bury this dead pony next to the dessicated corpse of the threaded-comments pony, brush the soil from knees, and forge onward.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:20 AM on May 24, 2012 [9 favorites]

I would dislike this and am glad that it is not going to be implemented. The current simplicity and ambiguity of the favorites system is a great thing, IMHO.
posted by alms at 11:21 AM on May 24, 2012

but I don't have a clear understanding of why the current favorites feature is problematic.

Well, there's problematic in objective fact and there's problematic in terms of community perception and disagreement.

The core thing is that favorites are pretty divisive in how they're perceived. Some folks like 'em, some folks hate 'em; some folks think they're a net positive influence on the site, some folks think very much the opposite; some use them primarily as bookmarks, others primarily as thumbs-up type expressions of agreement, other still as generic positive supportive feedback for content they just think is good in one sense or another. And so on. It's a very overloaded sort of cultural feature here.

So they're problematic in the sense that they're both pretty embedded in some aspects of this place and also something about which people have strong and non-unanimous feelings. Making changes to how they function, or increasing their overall profile or level or granularity of functionality, is consequently a much bigger deal than you might otherwise think if you just look at them as an ancillary bit of mefi UI functionality.

There's been a lot of discussion of the functionality over the years, enough so that I sort of feel bad saying "check out the 'favorites' tag in Metatalk" because it's a lot to read through, but by the same token I don't really want to try and recapitulate all of that from scratch in here either.

In the end our feeling about it as a mod crew is that there's a lot of actual utility in the favorites system as a way of complementing how mefi already works as reading/participatory material (you can use favoriting in aggregate as a nice crowdsourced window into some of the neat/notable stuff that happens on the site); we've intentionally avoided making it into a system for replacing normal reading or participation (so favorites don't change display order of posts/comments as they might on Reddit/Digg/etc, and fave counts don't highlight or threshold the visibility of comments, and so on); and that they're sort of controversial and people have mixed feelings about them is never going to go away but is a good argument for keeping them relatively contained as a feature. So we're pretty conservative about changes there either way.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:23 AM on May 24, 2012 [2 favorites]

I'm promoting something right now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:24 AM on May 24, 2012

Yeah, you can put that back in your pants, dude.
posted by gman at 11:26 AM on May 24, 2012 [4 favorites]

My favorite thing about favorites is that I can turn off seeing how much favorites anything has. Thanks for that feature! It means I can ignore them except when I misclick or when I want to know if my jokes are funny.
posted by aubilenon at 11:28 AM on May 24, 2012 [3 favorites]

Clearly, what's needed are Facebook Like buttons beside every comment.
posted by mkultra at 11:32 AM on May 24, 2012

The core thing is that favorites are pretty divisive in how they're perceived.

Does this mean the items under the Popular link aren't really popular?!

Yeah, you can put that back in your pants, dude.

That costs extra.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:34 AM on May 24, 2012

I skimmed through the +400 posts tagged favorite, favorites, and bookmarks {but not bookmark or favourite(s)} and came up with the following similar requests.

• I gots a rep. to protect, man.
• "favorite" usage
• "Thanks!" Button
• On Currying Favor...
• Metafavouriteness?
• Are Favorites Bookmarks or Endorsements
• I don't know how to use favorites
• What about a Ditto feature?
• Hod do you use favorites?

I'm sure you'll find plenty of interesting reading within. Enjoy!
posted by Edogy at 11:42 AM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

My favorite thing about favorites is that I can turn off seeing how much favorites anything has. Thanks for that feature! It means I can ignore them except when I misclick or when I want to know if my jokes are funny.

Awesome! I had no idea this functionality existed until now. Thanks!
posted by MoonOrb at 11:47 AM on May 24, 2012

The ambiguity is not a bug, but a feature:

Among other things, it keeps the Favorites Economy from devolving into a popularity contest.
posted by darth_tedious at 11:49 AM on May 24, 2012

I would not ride this pony.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 11:51 AM on May 24, 2012

Does this mean the items under the Popular link aren't really popular?!

Serious answer to a jokey question, but that's one of the things that's come up a bunch of times, you know? Like, the question of whether it's a good idea to automatically aggregate highly-favorited content when the meaning of favorites is fluid and varies from person to person. Or the question of whether automatically highlighting highly-favorited content is doing an injustice to quality content that isn't for whatever reason as likely to attract favorites specifically. And so on.

And it's all kind of interesting and complicated stuff, that we've spent a lot of time thinking about as a team and talking about as a community in Metatalk. And like I said we're in a place where we feel good about the utility of favorites as a way of identifying things that are pretty interesting, even though we don't at all consider favorites to be the only or the most important way to sift through stuff or think that there's a direct 100% correlation between favorite counts and goodness. Great stuff goes largely unfavorited sometimes; crappy stuff gets a big favoriting response sometimes; people will disagree about where something sits in the Greatness/Crappiness magic square in any case.

So the Popular Favorites page is pretty handy if you're looking for a quick fix of something interesting, but that doesn't mean it's the "Correctly Most Popular" page or the "Objectively Best Content" page, any more than the stuff that shows up in the sidebar or on Best Of or in podcast discussions is objectively the best. It's all just human systems (some aggregate, some personal) for complementing mefi reading habits with some highlight views.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:56 AM on May 24, 2012 [2 favorites]

That's a pretty good explanation cortex, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:02 PM on May 24, 2012

I don't have a clear understanding of why the current favorites feature is problematic.

It's only sort of problematic as it's currently implemented but we've made it pretty clear that we're not planning on supplementing it much at all. Adding a gamesmanship element, even accidentally, has introduced some behavior here that we're not that psyched about and are not interested on doing any more of, basically.

Every mod has their own feelings about them personally, but they're a divisive element, people use them differently, people interpret them differently, people occasionally act like jerks about them [or accuse others of acting like jerks about them] and I feel that I don't want to engage with otherwise decent people being assholes to each other or me because of favorites.

I turn mine off and I suggest that other people who are irritated by the sight of them turn them off as well. We're not going back to a pre-favorites MeFi either, that ship has sailed. We're not planning on implementing any future favorites-based features. Even the BestOf blog is mostly based on stuff we've seen that has gotten a lot of "fantastic" flags.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:02 PM on May 24, 2012

there's a lot of actual utility in the favorites system as a way of complementing how mefi already works as reading/participatory material (you can use favoriting in aggregate as a nice crowdsourced window into some of the neat/notable stuff that happens on the site) --- As a mechanism for helping you figure out what to feature on the sidebar, there's an awful lot of bad that comes along with that one benefit.
posted by crunchland at 12:05 PM on May 24, 2012

Let us bury this dead pony next to the dessicated corpse of the threaded-comments pony, brush the soil from knees, and forge onward.

As long as we can resurrect the edit window pony on occasion.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:08 PM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

As a mechanism for helping you figure out what to feature on the sidebar, there's an awful lot of bad that comes along with that one benefit.

Concrete, measureable bad, or "my guess is x is responsible for outcome y" bad? Because, and I feel like this isn't a new discussion for either of us so we're just sort of talking out the shape of what's come before, there's sort of "strong favoriting force" and "wake favoriting force" arguments that respectively either attribute snarky or attention-seeking behavior to being caused significantly by favoriting dynamics or more generally acknowledge that favorites can be one of a number of social feedback mechanisms that can end up encouraging that kind of behavior.

We had snarky and attention-seeking and one-upmanship on Metafilter long before favorites (and on the Internet in general before Metafilter, and in the world at large for ages before the Internet came along), and my feeling is that while it's worth thinking about how favorites play into that dynamic and I don't think it's overly hard to identify examples of where there's an element of that dynamic feedback in play, it's not at all what's fundamentally responsible for people's behavior. And to the extent that none of us wants to see more bad behavior around here, we tend to discourage that stuff in general and to think hard about how changes to the favorites system as one factor of that might affect things.

Basically I don't see favorites as being the problem with some behavior on Metafilter so much as people being people being the problem with some behavior. Favorites are one of a bunch of things that can, in theory, contribute to a bad dynamic, and a whole lot of those things can also contribute to a good dynamic. Unpacking those conflations is awfully tricky work and while I totally respect everyone's right to have their own gut feelings about these things one way or the other I'm suspicious of any sort of stark "well this is clearly a terrible thing" sort of arguments about stuff that seems, in practice, to actually be all kinds of complicated.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:22 PM on May 24, 2012

As long as we can resurrect the edit window pony on occasion.

And it can ride in an undead herd with the favorites tagging pony.
posted by EvaDestruction at 12:25 PM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think we should implement every one of these snowflake "my favorites have a different meaning to yours" so we have like fifteen different dimensions of scoring. Then we can all be winners.

Really curious about whether anyone actually uses favorites in a way other than the below two uses.

1. Agreement
2. Bookmarking

I'm not talking about "can someone dream up a use other than these?", I'm saying, "will anyone come forward with their personal use of favorites that differs appreciably from these?".
posted by Jpfed at 12:27 PM on May 24, 2012

I would make a leather jacket out of this pony and sell it to Indiana Jones.
posted by daniel_charms at 12:27 PM on May 24, 2012

EvaDestruction, goodness, yes, that one came up a lot in my skim just now.
posted by Edogy at 12:28 PM on May 24, 2012

I don't know if this is technically bookmarking but I usually use them for "I am going to remember to talk about this on the podcast" so I go in and favorite and then after the podcast sometimes go and unfavorite. Usually I just do this for posts though, not for comments. For comments it's usually some manner of "hey neat"
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:32 PM on May 24, 2012

Is all favoriting technically bookmarking?
posted by box at 12:36 PM on May 24, 2012

Jpfed: I don't think I've ever used favorites for showing my agreement with the poster. I mostly use them as bookmarks, but also for "+1 Funny", "that was a great story; here, have this shiny yellow favorite in return" and last but not least, "I have no idea why I favorited this comment".
posted by daniel_charms at 12:38 PM on May 24, 2012

I don't know if this is technically bookmarking but I usually use them for "I am going to remember to talk about this on the podcast" so I go in and favorite and then after the podcast sometimes go and unfavorite.

That seems pretty straightforwardly bookmarking.

Usually I just do this for posts though, not for comments. For comments it's usually some manner of "hey neat"

I would lump that in with what I called "agreement", though consistent with what daniel_charms notes, that's not necessarily the right word. It's more a statement that a comment/post is good.
posted by Jpfed at 12:41 PM on May 24, 2012

Is all favoriting technically bookmarking?

As far as the database is concerned. I guess you could think of favoriting-without-intent-to-return as like tearing off a little bit of a napkin and sticking that into the crease of whatever page you're on in a book so that it disappears once you turn the page. Except slightly less weird.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:42 PM on May 24, 2012

cortex: " I guess you could think of favoriting-without-intent-to-return as like tearing off a little bit of a napkin and sticking that into the crease of whatever page you're on in a book so that it disappears once you turn the page."

I hereby propose we change the name of "favorites" to "napkin bits". Discuss.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:43 PM on May 24, 2012

No. No Pony!
posted by cashman at 12:46 PM on May 24, 2012

Really curious about whether anyone actually uses favorites in a way other than the below two uses.

1. Agreement
2. Bookmarking

Upon occasion I'll use it in the short term, as a sort of vague-positive way to the end of a conversation with someone in-thread, to acknowledge I've read what they said, even though I have nothing else to actually say myself. (Sort of like a half-smile-nod before moving away at a loud party)

The only Favorites I keep though are "bookmark" type favorites.

Personally (and I know no one really cares about my opinion on the matter) the only quibble I have with favorites is I wish it was called something more neutral than "Favorites". If it is used for multiple reasons I think it should be named something more generic and not like something people should collect.
posted by edgeways at 12:50 PM on May 24, 2012

Let us bury this dead pony next to the dessicated corpse of the threaded-comments pony, brush the soil from knees, and forge onward.

Unfortunately, this pony's corpse was dumped in the forbidden Micmac burial ground. It will be back tomorrow, stinking of fear and unanonymizing your darkest AskMeFi questions.
posted by roger ackroyd at 1:05 PM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

Crunchland, I'm sure you remember this: Before favorites, people used the number of comments to measure the popularity of posts, and it was very demoralizing for some people posting neato little art/culture things as opposed to politics stuff that everyone wanted to argue about over hundreds of comments (or, back then, maybe a hundred comments! woo!).

There was no device for saying "this post is pertinent to my interests!" if one didn't leave a comment ... and often that comment was maybe "cool, thanks" or "[this is good]," but more often people who didn't have a specific observation to share skipped another "thanks" comment for the nth time in a post. So before "favorites," gamification was nevertheless absolutely still in play, and people used to boast about the number of comments their post got as proof that it was better/more popular/more important than something else. Human nature is persistent that way, I guess.

In hindsight, maybe only invisible favorites for comments (as opposed to posts) would have been better, I don't know. I doubt it, though... ultimately, some convention(s) would have formed or been borrowed so that people could give visible attaboys to certain comments, and I'm sure that the amount of thread clutter that would entail would be incredibly irritating. Who knows, really? But I definitely find the simple equation of favorites creating a popularity contest to be way too simplistic. The contest was there first.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:07 PM on May 24, 2012

1. Agreement
2. Bookmarking

Exactly, and those are the only two, or three if someone wants to say both, ways to use them. Really it comes down to two questions:

1) How am I using them, for me or for them?
2) Is it important that they are shown?

The second question is the contentious one because blah blah blah "scoreboarding" blah blah blah unicorn farts.

That should clear things up.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 1:09 PM on May 24, 2012

as a sort of vague-positive way to the end of a conversation with someone in-thread, to acknowledge I've read what they said

Yes, this is possibly my least frequent use, but a utility I particularly appreciate (though it does rely on the possibly flawed assumption that I'm dealing with someone who pays attention to favorites and who favorites their comments).

I think that there's a fuzziness between agreement and bookmarking in my usage some cases, which is "intriguing argument/opinion stated in an interesting way." It might not be agreement, and it might not be something I necessarily intend to refer back to, the way I do a particular Ask, for instance, it's more like "I found the way you put this compelling and would not mind stumbling across it again." Like breadcrumbs, maybe: "This was an interesting path you might want to follow again." It may be close enough to bookmarking generally not to be a third way (or fourth, counting the "conversation concluding" favorite) entirely, but it feels different to bookmarking for me.
posted by EvaDestruction at 1:11 PM on May 24, 2012

I still like apoch's idea from a few threads ago: Remove the "favorited by others" from people's profiles. Then people can use it as a bookmark or an upvote, but those who see it as some sort of validation of their existence would have to write their own greasemonkey script or something to keep score.
posted by terrapin at 1:13 PM on May 24, 2012

Damn, I really regret the use of the word "agreement". I should have simply said "appreciation" or (along taz's lines) "attaboys" or something like that.
posted by Jpfed at 1:17 PM on May 24, 2012

I'll confess to something I use favorites for - when I favorite a comment, I often come back to look through the profiles of other people who did. Same deal with folks who favorited my comments. I am thus building a list of those who shall be spared when my species comes to rule this planet.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 1:22 PM on May 24, 2012 [2 favorites]

I still like apoch's idea from a few threads ago: Remove the "favorited by others" from people's profiles.

I like going through other people's heavily favorited comments when I notice they've written something particularly awesome.
posted by lalex at 1:28 PM on May 24, 2012

I am thus building a list of those who shall be spared when my species comes to rule this planet.

Surely some type of pencil/pad device would be more efficient?
posted by arcticseal at 1:47 PM on May 24, 2012

I've told the mods privately and I'll now assert publicly that this is the best-moderated site on the Internet. Although I disagree with their stance on this particular issue, the fact that they are willing to engage in thoughtful discussions with members about any little thing that a member feels is important is just astonishing. They have the patience of Job when it comes to dealing with unruly people, and I am learning a lot about interpersonal relations from reading their posts.

Which is why I think there should be a distinction between bookmarking and promoting: I would favorite certain mods so hard that I might be accused of stalking. As it stands, I leave their posts alone and simply feel grateful for their incredible even-handedness. This place (MeTa especially) is an oasis of consideration in a desert of outrage.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:01 PM on May 24, 2012

Woah!

When I posted it, I had no idea that so many would turn up to beat the poor dead pony! I just thought one of the staff would show up and say either "Yeah, its on our list" or "No, we are not going to do it, for X,Y,Z reasons."

Anyway, my intention was to have some difference in what jpfed put it perfectly, appreciation/agreement vs bookmarking.

I don't always use third-party bookmarking tools, since they are prone to going belly-up (Delicious, I am looking at you), but its something I should look up.

That said, when a comment/post has a large number of favorites, I assume that many people like it, so I read it as do many other people, I guess. In a way, its a measure of how awesome that post was, so I don't see how an "agree" button would cause issues.

However, I respect that the mods have decided its not for MeFi and I am not about to leave this awesome place for a single feature!

Thanks. Consider this thread closed.
posted by theobserver at 2:23 PM on May 24, 2012

as if
posted by edgeways at 2:28 PM on May 24, 2012

*runs through thread waving a slightly besmirched pair of lederhosen, chased by lobster*
posted by EvaDestruction at 2:38 PM on May 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

so I don't see how an "agree" button would cause issues.

I see that 4 of the 5 mods made pretty detailed reasons how it would cause issues. If you're going to open a Meta you could at least read through them.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 2:43 PM on May 24, 2012

Save the lobster lederhosen stuff, seriously. This post has been open for three hours.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:01 PM on May 24, 2012

Apologies. That was ill-considered joke on my part.
posted by EvaDestruction at 3:19 PM on May 24, 2012

Rocket Surgeon - I did read through them and probably didn't agree? As I said, I understand their reasoning, respect that and am choosing to engage here within those boundaries.


posted by theobserver at 3:33 PM on May 24, 2012

Not gonna happen. Next.
posted by Justinian at 3:42 PM on May 24, 2012

Really curious about whether anyone actually uses favorites in a way other than the below two uses.

1. Agreement
2. Bookmarking

I'm not talking about "can someone dream up a use other than these?", I'm saying, "will anyone come forward with their personal use of favorites that differs appreciably from these?".

Off the top of my head I would add:

3. Encouragement
4. Acknowledgement
5. Sympathy/Empathy
6. Thanks
7. Appreciation

Very often the favorites I give are combinations of any of the above.

I don't enjoy the "popularity contest" aspect of favorites; I do very much enjoy the "giving & receiving feedback" aspect, the "allowing quiet participation" aspect, and the "learning more about other members to create a more nuanced picture of them" aspect (by seeing who favorites what). (I find the ""Howls of Outrage" Greasemonkey extension quite useful.) I would definitely ride the pony of an only-visible-to-myself site-native favorites bookmarking/organizing/tagging ability because it would frankly be so super-useful to me! But I understand why the mods/admins would rather just leave it all be as it currently is at this point.
posted by flex at 3:54 PM on May 24, 2012

very demoralizing for some people posting neato little art/culture things -- Well, as someone who used to post stuff like that, pre-favorites, I don't know that I agree that favorites have helped in that regard. Those things got posted then, and they get posted now, and they receive a lot of pushback no matter what because they deal with subjective things.

But at this point, I guess that we've had favorites for as long, if not longer than the time when we didn't, so it's truly pointless to oppose them now, even if I do think they have been a detriment to the site. The site has changed a great deal since they were implemented. The userbase has grown exponentially. It's true that we always had people mugging with snark and attention-seeking behavior, but we didn't used to have a way for that to be rewarded. And, I can't really see that more snark and attention-whoring is anything to be encouraged.

If we had it to do over again -- which we don't -- I think it would have been better to have the favorites system be private -- people could use them as bookmarks, or attaboys, or any way they wanted to, but only the people giving and receiving them would see them. And I know I'm in a total minority with that opinion.

If I could suggest one change that would probably shut me up forever on the topic, it would be that opting out of favorites would also make it so that you didn't see the favorites counts on any of the user pages. Short of that, surrounding the section on the user page where they are displayed with a named span tag so that they could be hidden with greasemonkey.
posted by crunchland at 5:54 PM on May 24, 2012

Really curious about whether anyone actually uses favorites in a way other than the below two uses.

1. Agreement
2. Bookmarking

I favorite comments that make me laugh. I've added favorites to express 'thank you' or even just to indicate that I heard/read another person's response to something I said.
posted by marimeko at 6:00 PM on May 24, 2012

Right, flex, those aren't "agreement", but they are "positive sentiments", which is really what I was trying to get at.

Something that may not have been clear when I asked my original question is that I was responding to the idea that there are just too many ways that favorites are used to give any specific uses for them special handling. People have largely responded with many (to me, minute) variations on "to remember a thing" (which I called "bookmarking") and "to communicate positive sentiments to someone else" (which I called "agreement", which was an unfortunate word choice).

marimeko has mentioned something that I would consider more distinct from my use cases when she said:

to indicate that I heard/read another person's response to something I said
posted by Jpfed at 8:17 PM on May 24, 2012

I think it is going to remain a moot point as long as people define the idea rather than the action, or essentially rather than operationally. There almost seems to be pushback against defining the behavior which has always seemed odd to me, as if obfuscation is preferable.
Favorites will always = +1 and there's no getting around that, so all favorites are plainly the same regardless. The only difference lies in intent, which could be defined by a couple of questions.

1) Is the favorite meant for you, or is it meant for the person your giving it to?
2) Do you want the favorite shown, or not?

I have never seen anybody list a reason that cannot be covered by those questions. There could be combinations in there but you would still see a clear intent based upon the answers. I'd be interested to hear otherwise.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 9:30 PM on May 24, 2012

+1 for plausible deniability
posted by flabdablet at 10:16 PM on May 24, 2012

Maybe it's in the way this question always gets asked, as in, it always mentions the favorite dead pony?

If someone simply asked for a "bookmarking feature" would that change the perception of this idea?


(apologies if this already exists as a discrete formal function on the site I am currently unaware of, or if I'm trying to put the same square peg in a round hole with this observation all over again...)
posted by jbenben at 11:06 PM on May 24, 2012

3. Encouragement
4. Acknowledgement
5. Sympathy/Empathy
6. Thanks
7. Appreciation

8. Sarcasm

I've been known to favorite a post/comment that I thought was wildly inappropriate & unselfaware, as a tribute to their bold stance against reason & rationality. They have to really throw caution to the wind though & show a willingness to utterly divorce themselves from reality in the furtherance of proving the total futility of their point while remaining completely unable to see it for themselves. You have to admire dedication like that.
posted by scalefree at 3:31 AM on May 25, 2012

I think it would have been better to have the favorites system be private -- people could use them as bookmarks, or attaboys, or any way they wanted to, but only the people giving and receiving them would see them. And I know I'm in a total minority with that opinion.

Minority perhaps, but not alone. If in the past posters were demoralized by only getting a few responses to neato little art/culture things, favorites are no improvement. Now you get an immediate snark response from someone who clearly hasn't looked at your links, and the snark gets a bunch of favorites. That's demoralizing.
posted by bitmage at 2:22 PM on May 25, 2012

Jpfed writes "I'm saying, 'will anyone come forward with their personal use of favorites that differs appreciably from these?'."

There is the stunt favouriting where someone posts how much they hate favourites and every one favourites their comments in that thread.
posted by Mitheral at 6:45 AM on May 26, 2012

Sometimes I favourite comments because I feel compelled to acknowledge them in some way and we still don't have a flag for 'That was a terrible pun and you should be ashamed of yourself.'
posted by the latin mouse at 1:05 PM on May 26, 2012