The worst part about it is the anonymity. If someone's got an opinion, they should come out and say it. If you can't even stand with your name behind your opinion - why should I respect it?
Actually they don't need to. Inn general 90% (or more) of forum users never post anything. They just read, download something or look up information.
By encouraging
everybody to make posts you create a forum with a lot of unwanted noise (thanks!, omfg awesome, yes, thank you, sucks, sorry for my bad english etc) while the goal is to have a forum based on good content, not the amount of posts necessarily.
Just to take the whole steam thread debate in the Assetto Corsa forums as an example this system of extended likes would have come in very handy. There were less than six people constantly nagging about how bad Steam was and kept on going and going and going constantly feeding each other thinking they voiced the opinion of the majority while in fact they were a super tiny minority complaining,
millions of happy Steam users would disagree.. Extended likes in that particular case would have resulted in many of these post made being classified as `disagree´, ´dislike` etc expressing the real opinion of the community.
People that are happy about something don´t start passionate threads to voice their positive opinion. However, and especially in sim racing, there is a minority active on many blogs and forums that have a day job being negative about everything. Physics are arcade, screenshots suck. omg another preview, your video is not in 1080p, why isnt this free etc and to be honest I am slowly getting fed up with this complaining attitude about everything and if sites don´t act fast this vocal minority is rapidly turning our once very positive and constructive simracing hobby into something really self-destructive.
There is a big difference in writing down opinions, and being right or telling the truth. The amount of utter nonsense people sometimes posts based on nothing else then assumptions or rumors might be correctly classified as dumb, although I don't like that classification either.
As said those wordings can easily be changed and we might do so (or not
), but not after being put under pressure by two or three people here in this thread. That's not how this forum works. Constructive feedback is always very welcome but sentences that start "if you don't do this, then.." get ignored, at least by me.
P.S. what I don't get is why people get all stirred up by a dislike icon yet some of these individuals make posts on the forums that go 100% against our forum rules: attacking, bullying etc which is all okay? So written offensive content obviously is accepted but classifying the exact same content as dumb/dislike all of a sudden is a bridge too far
<insert sarcasm button>
¨
