Sure, the custom emoji likes are good. But they should tally, so a gif reply only wouldn't cut it unless you shrunk any gifs to an icon.
Discussion
Why should they tally though? Then you get in to the territory of scoring systems.
I don't know if onboarding more people is a good excuse for repeating the same old mistakes.
I should add, I'm not sure I am right, I flip flop all of the time. I was requesting Primal add custom emoji support just the other week.
I'm just questioning the whole thing.
I'm rather addicted to posting on nostr, so I feel like I'm just feeding in to the thing that I really don't like.
I feel you; bots can corrupt like counts. To me, this is more of a long term concern. I think this is a transition which will play out naturally as a result of non-fiat incentives.
Old social media didn't want to fix it (astroturfing) and was protected by fiat incumbency, but once we become the new social media, people will have the prosperity and freedom to migrate to more sensible solutions organically.
But for now, people have enough new stuff to learn while switching to Nostr IMO.