Well, it was just ONE forum, and I don't know if it was ****** or another firm.
However: The other forum skipped the negative likes totally (to which I agree).
They kept 3 positive ones (I don't know the why behind the choice for these three).
These likes aren't counted anymore, so how many likes a member gets is totally unclear.
The philosophy behind it seems to be, that a like is fixed to a post, not to a person. So it is an indication for the 'value' of the post.
What I liked about the 'old' like-system, is that you got some sort of value of the contributions of a certain member, as I guess a member gets likes for informativeness, helpfullness to others, and (of course, you cannot rule that out) popularity.
(The likes, of course, seen as a proportion of number of posts.)
So for (new) forum members that cannot distinguish easily between the value of contributions of different members, it could be some sort of indicator for trustworthyness of the posters. It has helped me evaluate the value of posts, on some forums where I didn't know which posts to take more serious, and which to take less serious.
greetz,
A33