2024-09-06 Reactions
====================

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

2024-09-06. Likes and Reactions by @Sandra@idiomdrottning.org.