John Cutler
Interesting Paul, I never considered the psychological effects of Likes. But then I do not use social media; too much misinformation, celebs and nasty people. I do not think Likes give as much feedback as we might think. For example I only give Likes on Amazon to reviews that are exceptionally good. Similarly I will only bother to review an item I have bought if it is very good or bad or is highly unusual. Then there is the question of bias. I would probably vote down any article written by a Jerseyman!
I prefer the objective statistics of number of views. It is unbiased, cannot be manipulated (assuming the AI robots are kept out -but why would they bother with the EMGS?!), needs no extra input from a viewer and should be easily provided by the software; the statistics are in the database somewhere! I would just like to know if expanding on a topic is a waste of time or not.