To ‘like’ or not to ‘like’; what is the question? … … Will WordPress answer it?
Am I alone in thinking that it is time for us to be able, with a simple click, to do more than ‘like’ a post? Do I like the words, or just the picture? Do I really like the post, or is it just that it impressed me? Do I like one picture in the post, more than one or all of them? (If presented as a gallery I think I can be selective, but galleries are still used by surprisingly few people.) Do I like the picture technically, or the subject?
Of course I can always ‘comment’ to make my reaction clear, but as the number of blogs I follow has increased I’ve less and less time to write a comment. I’d like a simpler way to do it. What is more, really great posts sometimes attract an enormous number of comments and, although many of them don’t say a lot, one more will hardly be noticed. Good examples of this are Steve McCurry’s blog and that of Lust & Rum, both of which always ‘blow my mind’ with something more than the photographic technical mastery. Another example: I’ve just ‘liked’ a post but I’m not too impressed with the pictures; I’ve ‘liked’ it because of the discussion of a photographic dilemma.
The widget dilemma
Since adding the ‘Recent posts I have liked’ widget to my blogs this has become an even bigger issue. This is a feature I really like because it makes a ‘comment’ rather more strongly than just adding to the like list on the post and hopefully takes some of my readers to a blog they might not normally see. However, I could easily ‘like’ 16 or more posts during one session of going through my reader (which I manage about every couple of days), which means a widget picture would have a life of only a couple of days. Before adding this widget I used to ‘like’ just about every post on Broken Light whether I really liked the photo or not, just to give hopefully some encouragement to the contributor, but to do it now could mean my right hand sidebar would be full of nothing but Broken Light posts.
I don’t have a solution. Can you suggest one?
I agree. There are also times when a blog post is about something important but awful, liking a report on a massacre, or an incident of pollution doesn’t seem right, even though in a case like that I always add a comment.
Reblogged this on Grumpytyke and commented:
I wrote this post on my photo blog as a result of pondering whether to put a ‘like’ on a post in which I liked the content but I didn’t want to say I liked the pictures. Some interesting input from Mimi; anyone else have any ideas?
“Like”
Great post. I feel like I have a full time “job” just reading and commenting on blog posts. Then I feel guilty, because I leave very short posts because I’m on my iPad, as I am now, and not on my computer. It’s hard to type with one finger, but I want to say something and give encouragement as well. I don’t think it’s as important what we like about a post, just that we do. But like you, I follow hundreds of blogs, and continue to find more. Thanks for introducing me to Steve mccurry. Wow. Sorry, no solution here.
Thanks ‘chef’. I agree about the full time ‘job’ but I think that blogging loses a lot of its point if the comms are not both ways so, given that it’s not always possible to find the time to write a meaningful comment, then a more flexible ‘like’ system I think would be helpful. As for the ‘recent likes’ mosaic, I think the pix could be smaller and thus could be increased in number (32?) but also it would help if a ‘like’ on a blog which is already represented in the mosaic just substituted the new one. I’m sure the geeks at WordPress could program that without a big problem. Glad you found Steve McCurry – I just love the way that he usually seems to find the time to dig up the right words, not relying on just his amazing pictures.
I completely agree with you, but then, I’m not sure I do, because different people have different amounts of available time to comment, some blog way more than others, and, there are so many different kinds of blogs out there! I might Like a post, even though it’s really depressing or sad, and has nothing to do with food, which is my main focus, although i follow many different kinds, so a Like almost seems trite. I guess what I’m saying is that one more format probably won’t do the trick. To me, there should be different formats within WP that allows for the appropriate kind of reaction the author wants, just like each blogger can pick his own custom theme. Those WP geeks should certainly be able to do that as well. Let’s face it, too, each blogger has his or her own goals with blogging – some being the number of followers, some being money, some just having fun, like me. And when I do feel guilty for writing short comments even though I’m on my ipad, I reassure myself that if it’s all I can do, then so what. There are just no rules to blogging, at least not for me, as a non-professional. But I certainly agree that there should be more than Like and comment. And they should get busy! Can you tell I’m not on my ipad now?!!!
I can tell! Thanks for the really interesting input. You’re now one of the few bloggers I follow from both this, my ‘photography’ blog (for the food pix), and the more general one (for the food itself). That helps a bit because if I ‘like’ from here it’s a comment on the photography, if I ‘like’ from the other it’s about the food. But you’ve hit the nail on the head: to put a ‘Like’ on some posts seems trite to me too. I think I’ll reblog this on grumpytyke and see if any other thoughts come up.