Remember, these are anonymous buttons, so no statistics revealing your identity are tracked. We do pay for a service that tracks the statistics of which comments and articles are liked and disliked.

Also note that the service provides rather robust blocking mechanisms to prevent over-voting by one person. So the numbers may not update instantly.

I think we may need to add some new policies, such as “We suggest you don’t always “like” your own post or comments” and “Please try to add a comment explaining what you do or don’t like.” and “Contributors and commenters should not take “likes/dislikes” too personally, but see the buttons as a general guide as to how your thoughts were received.”

Thoughts? Likes? Dislikes?

Brian, Can you create these same Like and Dislike buttons for the article itself? I am wondering what you guys think of doing this?

Some explanation perhaps is always good to express why one likes or dislikes a particular article and/or comment.

Rarely is there any comment that I 100% like (except for mine of course :) And rarely is there any comment that I 100% dislike. So for me “like” mean “I generally appreciate the essence of the comment.” And dislike means “I generally don’t like the essence of the comment.” Maybe for others it is based on the tone.

We do have the option of renaming the buttons and also adding text that pops up to explain what each means.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think I will be using the “dislike” button very much. If I’m going to express displeasure over something that a person has written, I think I owe it to that person to explain why.