Reactions are an interesting thing. Even simple ❤️ or ⭐ reactions have an effect on how we communicate. Do we feel appreciated? Heard? Is this the end of the conversation? The replies get shorter, it's time to say good-bye, the last message gets a "like" and we're done.
My first contact with reactions was Twitter and Facebook, I think. Both accounts have been deleted.
On Signal and Discord, I noticed people using reactions in my gaming groups. There is no notification for these reactions.
Alex 🌈 🦄 🧞 Sound engineer be engineering the sound!
🎵 1 🛠️ 2 👍 1
On Threema, on the other hand, where most of my friends and family are, there's just 👍 and 👎 and practically nobody uses it. People just reply with emojis instead of reacting with emojis. These being ordinary messages ensure that I get notified.
Look at this, it says "bananen" but for a moment I thought it said "banomen". 🤔 Like "baverben". 😂 🤨
The user interface issue for reactions is tricky in chat, because reactions are associated with the message and don't trigger their own notification. I think this is fine but the result is that only immediate reactions are useful. If somebody goes through older messages of mine to react to them, I won't see them. They've scrolled of my screen.
Reactions in fedi clients where they repeat the message being reacted to and they are aggregated and grouped per day (like in Toot!), they work surprisingly well.
In a corporate context, for email, as implemented by Microsoft in Outlook, for example, I feel that reactions are not cool. At work, people started reacting with 👍 instead of writing back "I agree" and now I can't just look at my inbox, I get a new notification sidebar with notifications to watch, and since there's not enough context to the reaction in the sidebar, I have to click through and look at the old email again. This is wasting my time using a bad user interface and it feels disrespectful because it brings reactions from a friends and family context (where I appreciate them) into my work context (where I do not).
#Social Media