So don't call it a "like". Call it something else, say "props" or "kudos". The whole point here is to establish a currency for acknowledging quality, it need n

So don't call it a "like". Call it something else, say "props" or "kudos". The whole point here is to establish a currency for acknowledging quality, it need not represent actual "liking" of anything. There is a deeper point here which is: what is a like anyways? Clicking a button to indicate you enjoy something has no use for the user. On Facebook users do it as a form of social signaling. On some other sites "liking" is essentially bookmarking for later use. It's important to separate the actual utility of clicking a button vs. the concept notion of liking something. > "You wish they were "recommendations" instead. But this is already a solved problem." You're conflating two things. What you're talking about is sharing - you share a restaurant with a friend, or you share a funny cat picture with your cousin. "Recommendation" in this context means generating, programmatically, relevant things for you to look at. The power of "likes" (or any kind of quality score, really) is that you don't need to know the user's social graph to locate for them content they will be interested in. Even in a social networking context, a quality score allows you to expose the user to good content outside of their immediate social sphere, which on a photography website is certainly a desired feature. The website in question is not about viewing the photo feeds of your internet friends, but about discovering the best content across the entire community, even from users who are completely disconnected from you in the social graph. Unless I'm reading this blog post horribly wrong, when you click on "Recommend" you don't direct this recommendation towards anyone at all. It's simply "I mark this with my stamp of approval, which in turn will help surface this good content to other users of this website". There is not a social angle to this at all, nor any sort of directed sharing. Anyways, I think this is a great idea. There was a website I used a long time ago called thesixtyone. It was an indie music site where discoverability was the core feature. You got "hearts" which you can give to specific songs. Your hearts replenish daily (use them or lose them), making them a currency, and preventing you from just heart'ing everything willy-nilly. There's an elegance to this system that photographer.io can borrow: if you heart something (and therefore expose it to more users) and they in turn also heart the song, you get more hearts to spend. Essentially, users with taste that the community agrees with will get a louder voice, and the community becomes more directed as a result. It also allows you very clear visibility into influencers in the community. There was also a neat gamification angle to it that gave achievements for tasks, with the overall goal of making sure you spend your hearts instead of doing nothing with them.