It didn't remove its dislike button. It just removed the ability for you to see how many dislikes something has, presumably because viewers making their own decisions based on that information was bad for watch-time statistics (naughty user, making decisions for yourself! Obey the algorithm, peon!).
Yes I am aware that content creators can still see the dislike bar, and for exactly the tongue in cheek response you gave. Seeing an at a glance 'something's fucky' with the video is the entire point to having a visible like/dislike system, and it's
entirely transparent what they're doing when they kept the likes visible while hiding the dislikes. If they wanted to prevent hug/hate-boxxery, they could have simply hid both. Keeping the positive while removing the negative one simply proves the point that it's about their inability to take criticism. (Youtube Rewind 20...18 I think? getting obliterated from low earth orbit for example)
I disagree with the youtube comparison because, importantly, QQ is above all else a forum first and a content aggregate second. Personally I very rarely look at the likes to dictate whether or not something is good, and indeed likes are at the bottom of the post on the default UI. There's not a like based algorithm, it's all bumps. You cannot even SEARCH threads or posts based on their like counts.
It is a forum, yes. But it's also a forum
about content creation, in this case
writing. We have Writing, NSFW Writing, and Off-Topic, implying that Writing and NSFW Writing are 'on-topic' and thus the primary point of the forum and what most people to come here for, either to create written content or to consume written content, with the latter obviously being greater than the former.
And while you can't search by like count as a whole you can-
You can sort threads by like count of first post. Might be new with XF2.
-that. Yes, specifically 'first message reaction score' which would imply that said rating on that first post, much like the like/dislike bar below a video before you actually start watching the video, is a viable metric to sort and evaluate a story by.
That's because it's not in the search function. It's under "Filters" when viewing a board.
The previous version had it too, but it was a little drop down thing at the bottom of the pane in the subforum you're looking through iirc. Didn't use it that often except to find stories with specific tags or specific word counts as anything past that is a bit clunky.
Both likes and dislikes are too low effort to really mean anything apart from a general sentiment. That may be fine for regular posts (but probably not), but for stories actual criticism is high effort and rarely is acted on. At a minimum you have to care enough to actually comment and figure out what you don't like. So you complain about something, and one of three things happens.
You get brigaded by people who don't agree (including the author), and now have to fight an internet battle for way too long on a story you don't care much about.
Which is the primary reason why I said that QQ likely didn't need a like/dislike system because it's too small a community for it to actually be useful. Likes and dislikes like that work better when concrit
isn't easier to get across and you're mostly working on vibes and general trends ('
I made two things, this one thing has better metrics than the other thing' for example) Again going back to youtube, if you're someone with hundreds of thousands of followers and get 10k+ comments per video, actually
reading all of that and getting a grasp on any problems is restrictive either on time or actual physical capability, so requires a more broad view of general egagement rather than any specific criticism.
There's just very few threads that move so fast that people can't easily keep track of them. I can only think of a handful of writers on here that have the kinds of writing pace and reader base that would necessitate anything like it, where 20-30 pages of discussion go by per story post with the author posting every day to every other day that would make keeping up with the discussion impossible for some people up to and possibly including the author themsleves.
You get asked how to fix the issue, which means that now you have to act as a teacher to a fic you have low investment in.
People are always going to ask that anyway, regardless. And they will also bring up the same thing over and over again after every story post exactly
because most people don't read the thread in full, either they only read story posts, or they read only the same page or maybe the page after the story post then bring up a topic that was probably resolved 5-10 pages back in the discussion. That's just the nature of a forum style system and people dropping in without reading through the backlog, either because they don't want to or are incapable of it in some way. I've seen it happen plenty of times, people bringing up the same thing the author has answered a dozen times before because they aren't following the thread.
You find out that the author is fifteen chapters ahead on Patreon or Royal Road and the complaint would require an onerous rewrite and is vital to later plot points.
That's a problem with the episodic release format in general, though paywalling it certainly makes it more of an exercise in teethpulling as there's monetary incentive to
not fix things that could be glaring plotholes.
