Back in the mist of time - I used to play colossal caves on the 370/158 in the middle of the night as another batch input tape was jerkally inched through.
Halfway through the caves - I can’t remember where - but it wasn’t “You’re in a set of twisty little passages all the same” there was a magic word “Plove” teleported you somewhere where you could pick up a treasure item or something similar.
I knew about Plove! There weren’t any clues anywhere in the user interface to its existence.
I guess I knew because somebody looking over my shoulder one night & said try this. And I guess they knew about it because somebody looked over their shoulder. And I guess if a chained back far enough I’d either find that somebody wrote the code or somebody decompiled the binary and found the string & wondered what it did.
Why am I saying all this?
Because I just reacted to a post in meta with something other than a like.
I am apparently one of 392 people who have used a reaction as opposed to 12.4 k people who have used a like .
That strikes me as interesting in a forum like meta where I expect the users are discourse cognizante. Is the conclusion that there are 12.1k people who are ignorant of the difference or 12.1k people who don’t care about the extended features that are loaded into this discourse instance and aren’t perhaps loaded into their home discourse instance?
And then that further takes me to wonder are the addition of Reactions bloatware? Is the discovery or not the discovery cos I had read about them but the first use a rite of passage, collectively is it the evolution of culture? Is it subculture if I’m one of 400 out 12,000?
My wider thinking is that there might be one platform but there are many patterns of use within it and those patterns of use are different and the difference is together make up community and what makes of community patterns is required to reach vibrancy ?
Does anybody else have musings to share? Maybe inspired by this or perhaps completely unrelated!
So by analogy there might have been 392 reactions in an hour whereas there have been 12,000 likes in a millennium? Or another way you can’t see from the statistics the rate of adoption.
That raises another question for me. The discourse forum I use most does not publish or expose any of the stats from the admin panel.
Thus community members are disenfranchised from caring for the health of the community while at the same time they’re investing effort into something that only has a return if the community is healthy
Investment of effort with only a speculative grasp on return maybe makes membership equivalent to visiting a casino or partaking in spread bets or equiv
Maybe this is a subliminal factor in the amount of effort that folk are willing to invest at various stages of community formation and their individual journey?
I do think aggregate investment is -a- determinate of probability of vibrancy/ critical mass
Users will naturally be inclined to use the most obvious, quickest action to reach (especially on mobile), which is the default one: on Discourse, on Facebook.
I’ve chosen not to use reactions. And one reason is that Likes are built into Discourse’s mechanisms, whereas reactions are somehow a disconnected extra. IIUC, you don’t get level promotions for reactions, and you may get level demotions if you don’t get likes.
It is true that some people don’t like the heart, and prefer a thumbs-up. And some people like the creativity of choosing the reaction that fits their mood. But I find reactions confusing, so I haven’t enabled it on my forums and I don’t use it here.
I’m with you on this one. I like that it’s a feature, and some uses cases definitely benefit from it. It’s also grown on me through using them on meta. However, for our use case, I feel simple is better, and just having a quick symbol of “Thanks” or “I found this interesting/useful” is enough.
@merefield - I was aware of various ports and websites I wasn’t aware that you could play it within discourse¡!
Although I’ve installed it an instance of discourse on some web hosting I am really trying to stay out of the admin side of things to explore my interests while containing avenues of exploration from the explosion
Those are good points. Im currently questing to understand the architecture of discourse. You’re comment that likes are part of the infrastructure or networked components with sympathetic actions and reactions aren’t is exactly the sort of architectural element or decision that I’m trying to understand
다만, 신뢰도(Trust Level)의 경우 생각만큼 리액션의 영향이 크지 않습니다. TL2를 얻으려면 1개의 좋아요를 주고 1개를 받으면 되며, 일단 획득한 후에는 자동 강등이 없으므로 일반적으로 유지됩니다. TL3의 경우 100일 동안 30개의 좋아요를 주고 20개를 받아야 하는데, 이 또한 크게 부담이 되지 않습니다(또한 설정이 가능하므로, 이것이 장벽이 된다면 tl3 requires likes given 및 tl3 requires likes received를 조정할 수 있습니다).
모든 커뮤니티에 리액션이 적합한 것은 아니지만, 원한다면 사용할 수 있는 옵션이 있다는 점은 좋은 일입니다.
새로운 회원들에게 무엇이 가능한지 보여주는 가장 좋은 방법은 다양한 기능을 활용하는 커뮤니티를 만드는 것이라고 생각합니다. 실제로 포럼 매뉴얼을 읽고 싶어 하는 사람은 없으므로, 여기저기에 실용적인 데모를 배치하는 것은 수행할 수 있는 다양한 기능을 드러내는 매우 좋은 방법입니다(그리고 '실제 맥락에서 사용’이라는 점도 상당한 가치를 더합니다).
I really don’t see this. If you find yourself in a culture where everyone uses reactions and no-one uses likes, you’ll not get the Trust Level behaviour you expect. The two facilities behave very differently, and there’s not much hint of that, other than the display of reactions on the left and likes on the right. Which is something, but not self-explanatory!
하트()도 리액션의 일종이지만, 말씀하신 취지는 이해합니다. 다른 커뮤니티에서는 하트가 여전히 인기 있는 선택지라 제가 직접 그 효과를 확인한 적은 없지만, 리액션이 동일하게 집계되도록 개선되는 것이 더 좋다고 생각합니다. Contribute 기능 요청에 대한 기대가 큽니다.
That’s mostly what I think, but maybe I’m just old. (I remember “You’re in a twisty maze a passages that all look the same” from Zork; I also learned Fortran on a DEC PDP-10—thankfully I was able to use terminals that printed on paper rather than punch cards).
I’ve seen people make compelling arguments that “liking” a sad post is inappropriate, and I have to agree. For me, though, I’m willing to assume that if someone “likes” my post it could indicate acknowledgement, agreement, I’m with you (in which case, a “like” for “my mom died” is just fine), as well as “I like what you posted”.
Mostly, I’m annoyed at the extra clicks that the reactions take, but am willing to put up with them because some people think they’re cute.
EDIT: But from now on, I’ll just choose the most absurd response and go with that. No more s for me. I think that may be my favorite. What on earth does it mean?
Perhaps I’m repeating myself but the simplicity of the heart was one of the genius fresh approach things that attracted to Discourse in the first place.
I definitely give my users the benefit of believing they understand the meaning of a heart is dependent on the context of the post to which it is applied.
I disliked smilies at first when they came all over the Internet discussion systems until I started to use them and understand they were helpful in conveying emotions and brought something to communication.
The same happened with emojis; I now consider them an important part of online communication.
I also disliked “likes” on Facebook, then reactions, because I found having only one way to react was good enough, until I started using them (not talking about Facebook, but multiple reactions in general), and found out they were great to allow us to express a range of emotions or feeling to a message without having to reply.
My own experience seems to repeat itself. And, of course, as the previous paragraph implies, I didn’t like reactions on Discourse until I liked them.
My experience with reactions mirrors @Canapin - I didn’t like reactions until I liked them. same with emoji and hearts and the like (pun intended).
On the forum where I am admin, the demographic are mostly manly men guys who have explicitly reacted negatively to reactions and hate the heart like icon. so not only are reactions disabled but the heart is replaced by a thumbs up. that’s it. no other possible visual response to a post. I have tried to enable reactions twice at the request of some users but a very loud group of regular users won’t have them.
Same here. I used to think it was just ‘effort’ to add a reaction but then I realised ahh this is pretty neat because regular likes don’t cover other emotions etc whereas, reactions do.
hah Zork for real, but the one that became a real time sink for me was Oregon Trail. I was telling my teenage gamer daughter about it one day and so she went and installed it on my ipad. how is that game still alive? I am very scared to tap that icon for hours of dissintry and broken wagons.
Interesting. I don’t know. I feel that reactions are a part of communication like many others.
In real life, we have many physical communication assets to convey emotion (facial expressions, gestures, voice changes, etc.) that we don’t have from one computer to another besides standard punctuation or stuff like this: “great.” “great!” “great…?”.
Even those can also be very ambiguous depending on factors like the relationship between the people who are communicating the context or their personality traits.
Some people accommodate very well with that, but in the end, I think smilies, emojis, likes, reactions and all of this converge toward a single goal of being able to express ourselves more like in real life.
on Discourse, 
on Facebook.
may be my favorite. What on earth does it mean?