It's been interesting watching the 'likes' stats evolve, actually, since we moved over to the new forum software. They're certainly a measure of something. We can probably have a nice debate on what that is and whether or not it's important.
Personally, I think the notion of fishing for 'likes' is kind of bizarre. It's certainly a validation of how opinions, or at least posts, are measured. But the guys on the forum with the most likes are either moderators, who naturally get lift because of the great and obvious respect everybody has for our judgement and intelligence, or simply frequent posters with strong opinions (because it's the identifying with the opinions rather than the quality of the response that people tend to vote for). The very best content providers we have here on the site (and I make a special exception here for WG, who posts a ton of third party content and who is also a mod and has a high like count) aren't necessarily the most-liked posters. This is because creating content-heavy posts is like giving birth, while snarky one-liners (positive or negative) are a dime a dozen. Just playing the odds, the dime/dozen posts are going to add up.
I also think that, if we had a 'dislike' button (a very bad idea in my opinion), we'd see like and dislike counts in just about equal measure for just about every member. Maybe the like/dislike differential would tell us more about the overall quality of the posters. Either way, it's been an interesting feature to have enabled.
