because it's fun to know how many people are actively on a site with you

I would second this. This would also be a good mention of being able to like someone's post w/o having to comment. In this instance you would know how many people supported the recommendation.

agreed, would hopefully cut down on empty-quoting and "this"

added to the list!

i pretty strongly disagree with this one - i think the ability to like peoples' posts might cut down on white noise, but i also think it takes away from forum culture of just posting and having a discussion. silently getting likes on a post might be good for user engagement and bring people back to check their likes, but i think it's just unhealthy.

i actually don't mind emptyquoting that much

As a counterpoint to consider, I'm not sure if you're on one of the "splinter" file sharing sites that spawned off BTB, but one of them implemented a "Thanks" button on posts and, in practice, it doesn't seem to have harmed discourse and actually adds an element of humor on occasion when people are thanked sarcastically/accidentally and the thanker can't "un-thank".

That said, we have, what, like 100 active users here tops (guessing)? Probably not a priority issue to consider either way until user counts go up.

I can go either way on the Thumbs Up/Thanks type of thing really, but it does make it handy when you want to give a little support to something but don't necessarily have a lot to actually add to it. For forums I ran in the past I always had a minimum character count required to avoid emptyquoting issues which had its own pros/cons. Might be worthwhile for just the Feedback/Feature Request area but not for the forum in general. But honestly, I am just happy to see an old school forum again that isn't reddit or some of the other trash places that are similar. Very happy to be here.

I agree with this. Like function while engaging can feel like a cheap trick to swap now just peoples view behavior but posting behavior. Let the posts speak for themselves, not a like number.