Yeah, if you don't give people some way to "like" things, you'll just get lots of comments that are nothing but heart emojis and such. It'd be like when AOL users discovered Usenet and there were lots of "Me too!" posts because they wanted to agree but didn't have anything to add.

As much as I love shilling IRC, Discord & Zulip have the right ideas with emoji reactions. It allows one to signal acknowledgement without spamming the chat. Frankly, Discord's recent decision to make reactions trigger push notifications was terrible.