In reply to wercat:
> well that might be true but being disliked is a bit more bad sounding than being disagreed with perhaps?
There's the problem in a nutshell - getting a 'dislike' on a post is not necessarily "being disliked". I've seen people busting up their own threads with a whinge about a dislike on the OP when it's entirely likely that the 'disliker' was actually expressing agreement with them.
This could be an example even. If Gordon has a recent facebook friend request from Doug Scott, what could that mean? Well possibly that some random person has hacked Doug Scott's FB account and is (mis)using it themselves. I wouldn't like that idea. I would dislike it in fact. So if I wasn't in the habit of posting loads and loads (and loads) of words on here, perhaps I'd just push the button that says "I dislike this!"
Lots more people read the forums here than ever post in them. If one of those users has pressed the 'dislike' button, they are not going to de-lurk and engage in a conversation with some outraged regular poster demanding to know why. They already didn't want to put their heads above the parapet when things seemed perfectly (by UKC standards) friendly, they're not going to de-lurk specifically to get into an argument. How many times has this experiment been tried now? "Disliker - why did you dislike my post?" Four more dislikes but no answer.
The answer will never come, but the additional dislikes always will because pushing the dislike button is just a ridiculously easy way to troll someone who has chosen to make themselves the lowest-hanging fruit for a troll you can possibly imagine. Like a well known and widely respected author who has a bit of a meltdown in public every time someone presses the "have a bit of a meltdown in public" button. "Dance for me monkey!" says the random troll with the IQ of a grapefruit, and the guy with a brain the size of a planet obliges.
So Gordon, and all the other dislike whingers, pretty please for the sake of your own sanity, if you can't just ignore the dislikes turn them off and forget they were ever there! (At least until the next time you're reading the text of a thread about something else entirely that gets derailed onto the most tediously repetitive topic UKC has to offer.)