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Likes and Reactions

I love the reactions feature in Delta Chat, I think it’s great.

Now it’s been studied somewhat how bad and horrible collecting likes is on world-readable popularity contest social media. It messes with our psychology in bad ways. One of the reasons I hate BGG is seeing a bunch of bad guys and bullying posts and bad takes get way more likes than the posts that are more along with my own values. That’s heartbreaking seeing that over and over again.

But likes and reactions are really good in communication with friends and fam.

I’ve turned off seeing likes on Fedi but what I really wanna set up, once I have the spoons, is to turn it on for people who are directly mentioned in the posts. So that people can ack via liking instead of having to type up a reply. And then leave it off for everyone else.

And in email and text messages I sure as shandy wanna keep it on!

When I first turned off likes on Fedi I felt like the drunk aunt at a party who suddenly can’t read anyone’s expression. I didn’t know if I what was saying was rude or appreciated.

Text is such a limited medium. Hell, even talking face-to-face is, language inherently is, but text is way worse. Emoji reactions help mitigate that a little bit. It’s the textual equivalent of nodding along or “uh-uh” or lack-of-frowning in a face-to-face convo.

I had promised myself to keep it off on Fedi for one month and for almost the entire month it felt really bad having them off. I did start got get used to it near the end of the month but I did turn them back on. But then a year and a half later I turned them off again and this time I’ve kept them off (and it's been months now, with them off). Saves me so much time that I was spending neurotically check-check-checking for likes. But, again, if I could make an exception for people who actually are mentioned in the post, that would be great so I could see if people-who-don’t-reply got mad at my reply or if they thought it was OK.

Alex Schroeder writes in:

I felt that email reactions were bullshit because I only saw them in a corporate context: at work, people started reacting with 👍 instead of writing back “I agree” and now I couldn’t just look at the inbox,

I was under the impression that AOL style “I agree!” posts were universally behated? Or maybe that was just me. I’d rather have the reaction.

I remember David Allen talking about, this was before the days of reactions, they instituted a policy of “never ack!” Never say “OK”, or “I got it”; just assume it got through. This is a very dangerous policy since bugs and human error happen. But that’s how annoying the explicit ack flood was getting. Some kind of interface that’s different from “writing back ‘I agree’” would be really good. The question is how such an interface would be best designed.

there was also a new 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 email again.

You’re right, that does seem like a really bad interface for them. But this convo started out as being about the wire protocol for reactions, not limits of that specific app you’re using (not sure which one that is).

I was thinking Delta Chat, which I know you’ve tried also, not whatever-weird-work-mail-app you’re talking about here.

I felt it was wasting my time using a bad user interface

Yeah, sounds like. I can understand that.

and it felt disrespectful because it brought reactions from a friends and family context (where I appreciate them) into my work context (where I do not).

While I also hate my colleagues and spit at photos of them every night, I like the irreverence and informality that a li’l “I’ve seen this” or “I like this” or “This looks good” reaction can have.

The user interface issue is tricky even in chat, because the reactions are associated with the message and don’t trigger their own notification (which I like), with the result being 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.

Right, I can see some downsides to that. On the other hand, reactions to the most recent message are more important. That’s something I might really wonder how they feel about. Scrolling back and looking at older messages and seeing “oh, they did belatedly like this one” is a weird experience and you’re right that this could be improved—you called it “tricky” which is the perfect description, not too alarmist but acknowledges the imperfection.

Reactions in fedi clients where they repeat the message being reacted to and they are aggregated and grouped per day (like in Toot! App), they work surprisingly well.

Oh, yes, but then we’re back to the psychological effects of the popularity contest of “writing for the likes”, even though there’s not an interface issue.