I just want to share that I think the fact that this site does NOT have any "like" or "+1" feature is a tremendous benefit to the community.

The reason I believe this is because such features drawn too heavily on the psychological influence of "populism" and "majority rule" which is counterproductive to any sense of an "Entheogenic University".

Its much more important that people determine for themselves how valuable a post is, without the weight of the fact it was either "approved" or "disapproved" by X number of people.

In all honestly, they are using features like this on so many websites to mold people into a cookie cutter existence on one hand, measuring the amount of consensus of various topics on the other, and in the background many posts with no attention may be of a critical or relevant nature even though they didnt "tickle peoples fancy" enough to get a "like/+1".

So all in all, good job YET AGAIN seeing through the BS of the modern ways the internet is being constructed and not allowing it to seep into Nexus!

Big ups to all Mods and Admins!

dreamer042 likes this post.

I think one of the reasons social media have a 'like' feature is to determine which posts or comments to show.

When your friends have posted several hundred posts, it's too many to show, so the list needs to be narrowed down, and 'likes' are a simple and obvious way to build a metric that can subsequently be fed to the algorithms that choose what to show.

On the Nexus we don't have likes, but still you can only fit so much on the screen. So, for example, the recent posts (at the bottom) get bumped whenever someone replies; as a result, posts that get more replies have a higher visibility / discoverability. Granted, a reply is not a like (although sometimes it is - see dreamer042 ), it carries more information. So it draws people's attention to discussion, not popularity, although there is some correlation between the two.

Sometimes as you have described ordering posts by approval can be very practical and other times it can utterly impractical.

In my opinion even sites who use those features under such a guise are still doing themselves a disservice and detriment, but I do have an understanding that with the rapid fire manner in which social media operates that it can often good to have some sort of way to control the "bump order" other than just the order they are posted in by time.