Most of the reactions are either positive of negative, but if a comment has several reactions, I find it difficult to see immediately which are positive and which are negative. I’m not sure if this is a disadvantage, because it is slightly harder to get peoples overall valuation of the comment, or if it actually an advantage because you can’t get the pleasure/pain of learning the overall reaction to your comment without first learning the specific reasons for it.
Another issue, if we (as readers of the reactions) tend to group reaction into positive and negative is that it is possible to make several reaction to a comment. It means that if 3 people have left positive reactions, a single person can outweigh that by leaving 3 different negative reaction. A reader would only realise this by hovering over the reactions. I do think it is useful to be able to have more than one reaction, especially in cases where you have both positive and negative feedback, or where one of them is neutral (e.g. “I will repond later”), so I’m not sure if there is a good solution to this.
I think that the situation of someone spamming all the “bad” reactions on a post they don’t like is the upvote system that already exists. If a post has a fair amount of karma and then copy of 10 different negative reacts might not mean much.
The obvious way to quickly and intuitively illustrate whether reactions are positive or negative would seem to be color; another option would be grouping them horizontally or vertically with some kind of separator. The obvious way to quickly and intuitively make it visible which reactions were had by more readers would seem to be showing a copy of the same icon for each person who reacted a certain way, not a number next to the icon.
I make no claim that either of these changes would be improvements overall. Clearly the second would require a way to handle large numbers of reactions to the same comment. The icons could get larger or smaller depending on number of that reaction, but small icons would get hard to recognize. Falling back to numbers isn’t great either, since it’s exactly in the cases where that fallback would happen that the number of a particular reaction has become overwhelmingly high.
I think it matters that there are a lot of different reactions possible compared to, say, Facebook, and at the same time, unlike many systems with lots of different reactions, they aren’t (standard Unicode) emoji, so you don’t get to just transfer existing knowledge of what they mean. And they have important semantic (rather than just emotive) content, so it actually matters if one can quickly tell what they mean. And they partially but not totally overlap with karma and agreement karma; it seems a bit inelegant and crowded to have both, but there are benefits that are hard to achieve with only one. It’s a difficult problem.
Most of the reactions are either positive of negative, but if a comment has several reactions, I find it difficult to see immediately which are positive and which are negative. I’m not sure if this is a disadvantage, because it is slightly harder to get peoples overall valuation of the comment, or if it actually an advantage because you can’t get the pleasure/pain of learning the overall reaction to your comment without first learning the specific reasons for it.
Another issue, if we (as readers of the reactions) tend to group reaction into positive and negative is that it is possible to make several reaction to a comment. It means that if 3 people have left positive reactions, a single person can outweigh that by leaving 3 different negative reaction. A reader would only realise this by hovering over the reactions. I do think it is useful to be able to have more than one reaction, especially in cases where you have both positive and negative feedback, or where one of them is neutral (e.g. “I will repond later”), so I’m not sure if there is a good solution to this.
I think that the situation of someone spamming all the “bad” reactions on a post they don’t like is the upvote system that already exists. If a post has a fair amount of karma and then copy of 10 different negative reacts might not mean much.
The obvious way to quickly and intuitively illustrate whether reactions are positive or negative would seem to be color; another option would be grouping them horizontally or vertically with some kind of separator. The obvious way to quickly and intuitively make it visible which reactions were had by more readers would seem to be showing a copy of the same icon for each person who reacted a certain way, not a number next to the icon.
I make no claim that either of these changes would be improvements overall. Clearly the second would require a way to handle large numbers of reactions to the same comment. The icons could get larger or smaller depending on number of that reaction, but small icons would get hard to recognize. Falling back to numbers isn’t great either, since it’s exactly in the cases where that fallback would happen that the number of a particular reaction has become overwhelmingly high.
I think it matters that there are a lot of different reactions possible compared to, say, Facebook, and at the same time, unlike many systems with lots of different reactions, they aren’t (standard Unicode) emoji, so you don’t get to just transfer existing knowledge of what they mean. And they have important semantic (rather than just emotive) content, so it actually matters if one can quickly tell what they mean. And they partially but not totally overlap with karma and agreement karma; it seems a bit inelegant and crowded to have both, but there are benefits that are hard to achieve with only one. It’s a difficult problem.