Thanks Obsession

[Fox Mulder]

Just weighing in on something brought up in my last Site Feedback post about Guest Posting, about the subject of thanks. I will quote mod Wetmac, who made a great point: " Life is too short to worry about 'likes' I get on an Internet forum." He is spot on. Through the years here at OCC, I've noticed a LOT of obsessive behaviour in the forum over "Thanks." I do look at Thanks...to judge the popularity of a post, not a measure of my self worth. My "I Love You Funny Face" thread was getting no thanks for a few days. I just saw that as a nudge to take my time and crack better jokes. Obviously, most users are too busy wanking to bother leaving you a Thanks. Perhaps a better stat to measure your thread's popularity is "views." If you get a million views, you've created something people enjoy. It doesn't make you special though...this is, after all, just an Internet porn site. It's supposed to be fun. All of social media makes people think a like or thanks is some sort of great achievement. I think the obsession with thanks is why we have the problem of guest posters dumping off-subject crap on the threads of others. Some guys see a thread getting lots of thanks and think they can and must grab a share of thanks for themselves by posting there. That's got to be their reason, especially since they are free to start their own threads. If hoarding thanks is your reason for posting on someone else's thread, or posting anything, anywhere, period...you need to move out of your mother's basement and get a life of your own. OCC Thanks and Facebook likes are not like painting kills on the fusilage of your WW1 aircraft. You are not a flying ace... and all your thanks don't add up to a flying fuck. If you get all pissy with people over this thanks thing, I feel sorry for you.

[couliflower]

I agree with everything you said, however there's a useful dynamic connected to thanks: finding good content.

9 out of 10 times, a post with lots of thanks is a must read/watch post. That is especially true in those forum sections where fewer thanks are awarded (free sites, for example) and where one must click on a link or generally jump through a few hoops to get to the 'good part'. So, thanks are essential to know in advance wether a post might be ok, great or exceptional.

If anything could be changed, would be to stop displaying the amount of thanks in those forum sections that are essentially (re)posting of pictures. You don't need to know how many likes a picture has received in order to enjoy it. When so many thanks are awarded on every picture, the individual thank itself loses its value, and as you said, the focus shifts from the actual content (the image) to the amount of thanks.

So one thing that could be done is, keep the thanks function, but take away its 'public display' in certain forum sections. This will deter useless popularity contests.

[thefergieferg1]

I see one other major function of the 'Thanks' button, and that is to considerably reduce the number of short comments, e.g "she's hot" "Wow!" because these take up a whole post and clutter the thread. "Thanks" also serves as as " I agree" to a comment in a thread.