Does a "Like" button give enough feedback?

Reading a recent article from the Nieman Journalism Lab about testing a "Respect" button instead of a "Like" button for news items led me to think more about the benefits and disadvantages of "Like" buttons.

Facebook is well known for its "Like" button which allows users to "give positive feedback and connect with things [they] care about" but other sites have their equivalent: Google+ with "+1" to "give something a public stamp of approval" ; Twitter with "Follow" ; YouTube has thumbs up or thumbs down icons; Pinterest has "Like"; and Tumblr has a like.

So most of the major social media sites have one or at most two simple ways for a viewer to show approval and YouTube is the only one that allows viewers to rate an item negatively as well as positively with one click.

Allowing users to give positive feedback or approval with one click has the obvious benefit of making it very easy for users to interact with content.  It only takes a second to "Like" whereas adding a comment could take a minute or more.  So one-click approval encourages more interactions and keeps a site lively.

But how much does it measure, and more importantly, increase customer engagement?  More sophisticated ratings or comments provide much richer feedback, including making it clear whether the user finds the views expressed in the content interesting and worth sharing or perhaps just the topic itself, while not agreeing with all of the views expressed.  There are some interesting ideas on increasing customer engagement through social media in this prezi (and the Nieman article mentioned up front has some interesting insights on comments and polls)

Which is more important for a site?  Volume of instant feedback or in-depth engagement?

Well, of course you can have both with buttons and comment fields.

But maybe there is a way to gain more information from buttons without losing significant volume, and possibly encourage more comment by just making some users reflect a little more on the feedback they are giving.  How about one or two more buttons to record better the positive and negative sentiments and to rate the importance of the topic being discussed?

I feel most sites are in a rut of just using one standard button.

Time for an experiment?