Suggestion Petition to revise the 'likes' system or remove it

Bottom line is that until someone comes up with a better way to measure a contributing/established member, it's staying the way it is. Going back to a user needing to post 25 random posts and being a member for 14 days before they are considered "established", is not a better way of measurement.

I'm not opposed to changing how it works now, but if someone wants a realistic chance of changing it, their argument should include a better automated gauge.

 

To be honest, I'd be more inclined to revoke established member status for people who *didn't* follow the rules. For example you could do something like a user needs 3 *more* Likes for every warning they got historically.

Rewarding someone for doing nothing wouldn't be that useful. If a user signed up 5 years ago and never made a single post or did anything, they should be considered contributing/established? Doing that would make the whole system rather pointless... spammers just register accounts, don't do anything and then come back in a year (or whatever) with their zillion accounts that never did anything... and now they are established? The whole point of the system is that if you contribute nothing (or only low quality), you will *never* get established... Spammers/scammers *generally* aren't going to bother.

 

So you basically think we should go back to the old system of a certain amount of time being a member and a certain number of random posts? If anything, the users who have been here longer should have gotten *more* Likes vs. new users, why hold old users to an exponentially lower standard? Have you by chance forgotten all the "high quality" posts before the change was made? Do you really think it's a good idea to incentivize people to make idiotic pointless posts again?


Side note - I'm actually *very* happy with how things are working under the new system vs. the old. If you compare the timeframe since the change was made to the same timeframe before...

Overall traffic is up 4.36%
Broken down further, high quality traffic is *really* up, low quality is down:
US traffic: +9.30%
UK traffic: +10.55%
Canada traffic: +7.79%
Australia traffic: +11.02%
Germany traffic: +5.32%

India traffic: -2.10%
Indonesia traffic: -12.85%
Pakistan traffic: -11.15%
Malaysia traffic: -9.97%
Turkey traffic: -14.75%

It sucks to make those generalizations that certain geographical regions are lower quality traffic/users on average, but that's the reality. I don't know any website owner that would take 50,000 users from Pakistan vs. 50,000 users from the United States if they had to pick one or the other. That's not to say all users from those countries are bad, nor are all users from places like the US good... but if you are talking in terms of *on average*, yes.