Elgg/community_plugins — comment on commit 043c9c02858c29ad55a5c7483f4eaa55e6a71b3a
File:  line 0
By ewinslow:

These are valid points and I'm fine with this approach, but a few counter points for your consideration:
1. Facebook moved from the heavier weight "fan" to the lighter weight "like" to encourage interaction.
2. Facebook uses "like" and "recommend" interchangeably, so people might not be making the finer distinction that you are.
3. We could use likes on the backend but just display recommend on the frontend, same as you are doing with diggs.
4. It feels like duplicated effort to me to work on features of a plugin that are basically identical to likes. We're already spread very thin, so reducing work and making the work we do have the broadest effect possible is attractive to me.

I don't think we'd need to use it anywhere else. But discussion would be the only other candidate I can think of. It could be useful to reward people who ask good questions and give good answers by liking those things.