Notice: testing Discourse Reactions here on meta for 1 week!

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

@sam

At a minimum I cut out some of the negative reactions which I feel can be a bit dangerous on a public community.

Yeah i guess on this point, I was reflecting recently on “agreeing”-type reactions (differentiating from empathising-type reactions like how is intended). There is a Discord community for a video game that I play, which I was in. They had a “yes” and “no” emoji that were made themed to the game. I feel that those emojis were made fairly innocuously, but it can be surprising that it can kind of have a dangerous effect.

There are multitudes of cases where a community manager post messages and there are more than 10, or so, “yes” reactions to it,

(I blocked out usernames, the name of the game and developer company, though it is a public community)

unfortunately it kind of reinforces an already occurring problem in the community where some groups are ultra-defensive about the game and the dev’s decisions, and other people pile up “no” on things that they don’t agree with.

With the yes/no reactions, it can make it harder to empathise with people’s points of view, than if there were no reactions. It can make it harder to disagree reasonably and amicably with a post that has a ton of “yes” on it, as one can have the feeling of pushing against the grain.

But yeah I was wondering if it might be worthwhile perhaps to add a note on the plugin page — to consider carefully, before adding negative reactions (or agreeing-type reactions, in general) as they can really change the dynamic of a community.

(This Discord community had those emotes within a few months of going live, and it’s been almost 2 years, and yeah the use of “yes” has become pretty standard)

[Jonathan5]

@bloomexperiment

And I don’t use Facebook or Messenger, by the way, so I did not know this:

@Terrapop

It’s working the same way as on Facebook’s mobile app. Thus, I assume >90% can grasp the concept pretty fast. They will see more is possible by the reaction icons displayed for the post.

It doesn’t work the same way as Facebook, as it happens. I described it in my own reply to Terrapop’s message. But the way it does work there is very “Facebook” (different actions depending on whether you’re looking at a post or a timeline) so not easy to emulate anyway.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

I like the new set, FWIW.

[seanblue]

Ah, yes. The classic set of emoji: Heart, Laugh, Surprise, and Awkward Waving.

[seanblue]

I think the notifications for the reactions are a little awkward right now. I got three separate notifications for the reactions on the above post, one for each type of reaction. Additionally, for the non-heart reactions, the notification doesn’t even say what the reaction was (since the icons are the same there’s no way to tell). I think either all reactions should be consolidated into a single notification (or at least all non-hearts should be) or the separate notifications should indicate the type of reaction in some way.

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Additionally, I see that there’s now hover information in the post indicating who reacted which way. Unfortunately this covers the detailed table (shown from clicking) when the detailed table rendered downward.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@seanblue

I think the notifications for the reactions are a little awkward right now.

Yes they are … very aware of this issue. The fix is fiendishly complex.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

OK! So we’re about to pull reactions from meta, thank you everyone for the testing efforts! The plugin should be very robust now.