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.
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.