I just wanted to chime in and explain a couple things.
1) I am sorry we didn't give you all a better heads up and explain this before it went live. It's just a beta feature we are testing to see how it works. Tech Admin (Jeff) was working on this last week and was excited to roll it out to get some real world usage to make sure it's working properly. In hindsight we should have not rushed things, put together a proper announcement.
2) Attached you will see some stats regarding the traffic to our community. Unfortunately it's becoming increasingly difficult to rank well in the search engines with all the highly funded recipe sites out ranking us. We used to rank very high but we now end up behind the big guys. It's natural to have an ebb and flow with forums but you have to have a source of traffic to bring visitors by, hope they register so we can replace members who might fade away for what ever reason.
Since our organic search traffic has slowed down, we are trying to find ways to reach other like minded people (assuming our members have nice friends, lol). When someone likes a recipe or discussion on DC it will then show on their Facebook wall and the hope is that their friends will see that and come see what DC is all about.
Getting likes also helps in other ways. The search engines are now using social media "mentions" as ways to determine what websites/webpages are worthy. So if people are "liking" our recipes and discussions that helps the search engines understand our site is a site that people enjoy and that helps you rank higher.
"Liking" on Facebook is just one of a few ways to use Social Media to help DC remain part of the internet ecosystem. Our plan was to also find a way to Google+ and Tweet about recipes or discussions. The latter two are not as popular because less people use Google+ and Twitter but they are more valuable from a trust standpoint with the search engines. The reason is that Facebook fights with Google and does not share their like data but Google can access Twitter mentions and obviously their Google+ mentions.
As Jeff (Tech Admin) mentioned, this feature does nothing more then make it easy for someone to tell their friends about a recipe they like or a discussion they read. All the discussions are already 100% public so this does not add change any privacy issues. It's one of those things where if you participate on Facebook, great, help us get the word about the amazing recipes and discussions going on here at DC. If your not a fan of Facebook, no worries, you can disable it and continue with business as usual.
I am very sorry for the way we rolled this out, we'll make sure to more properly explain things in the future.