Gunnar_Zarncke comments on What reacts would you like to be able to give on posts? (emoticons, cognicons, and more)

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

I looked at two major channels on our Slack. The general channel and the main developer channel. The former is more social the latter more formal as you can see from the stats (the categories I tracked were the same):

#general:

up-vote (multiple kinds): 60

food: 17

social (graces and teams): 11

smileys: 12

custom (mostly company-specific): 37

insights:

• lightbulb: 1

• exclamation mark: 1

• question mark: 0

• trend (up/​down): 4

• checkmark: 1

other: 24

dev channel:

up-vote (multiple kinds): 62

food: 0

social (graces and teams): 1

smileys: 0

custom (mostly company-specific): 1

insights:

• lightbulb: 6

• exclamation mark: 1

• question mark: 2

• trend (up/​down): 0

• checkmark: 12

other: 15

Based on this sample I would say if custom reactions are not implemented the most valuable reactions are those under ‘insights’:

• lightbulb: is used for surprising or insightful information

• exclamation mark: is used to warn about something that requires attention

• question mark: flags open questions that should be answered

• trend (up/​down): information about a general positive/​negative trend

• checkmark: Different from an up-vote; indicates that something was completed and does not need further attention

[Pattern]

Stack overflow has something like a checkmark as a specific feature for questions, to

Indicate the answer chosen by the asker.