But what’s the benefit of having a small set of ‘standard reacts’ instead of allowing/requiring that users express their thoughts in feelings in text?
Would you rather see a dozen replies to a post that simply say “Updated.”? Neither does anyone else, so they don’t, which means we’re deprived of the useful feedback. Maybe one person replies “Updated.” and they get the karma for being first instead of (or in addition to) the original. That doesn’t seem fair. Or maybe they get downvoted for a reply that was too short, even if a lot of people agree. With an “updated” react, this just works.
This site in particular might be better because we don’t provide low-effort options for providing (effectively very-low-information) feedback.
I kind of think this is a good point, but there are tradeoffs. We want to lower the bar to providing feedback so we can get more feedback, but not so much that we disincentivize the discourse. I feel this tradeoff is probably worth it, but that’s a guess. If someone has something they’re willing to say, how often is a react going to prevent it? They’d probably do both, like how often people will downvote and also explain why.
I don’t mind any number of people replying “Updated”. So, yes, I would prefer that over a count of some small number of ‘standard reactions’.
But, as I suggested in another comment on this post, external survey tools could be easily used to gather this data or feedback if you or anyone else really think it’s valuable or useful.
I would like to see some evidence about how well those work and how useful that gathered data is before I change my mind about this being useful here.
We want to lower the bar to providing feedback so we can get more feedback
I don’t want this as I don’t think ‘more feedback’ is particularly useful, valuable, or germane to this site.
I’m also thinking about this request in terms of additional work, and ongoing maintenance, by the site’s developers/maintainers.
I’m also unclear why anyone would want to (seemingly) optimize for such incredibly low-density info as the count of ‘reacts’ on posts. We are mostly – at times explicitly – trying to avoid persuading each other and instead focus on sharing our (detailed) thoughts and feelings so that we can, as a group, reason better. This all seems exactly backwards given that.
Would you rather see a dozen replies to a post that simply say “Updated.”? Neither does anyone else, so they don’t, which means we’re deprived of the useful feedback. Maybe one person replies “Updated.” and they get the karma for being first instead of (or in addition to) the original. That doesn’t seem fair. Or maybe they get downvoted for a reply that was too short, even if a lot of people agree. With an “updated” react, this just works.
I kind of think this is a good point, but there are tradeoffs. We want to lower the bar to providing feedback so we can get more feedback, but not so much that we disincentivize the discourse. I feel this tradeoff is probably worth it, but that’s a guess. If someone has something they’re willing to say, how often is a react going to prevent it? They’d probably do both, like how often people will downvote and also explain why.
I don’t mind any number of people replying “Updated”. So, yes, I would prefer that over a count of some small number of ‘standard reactions’.
But, as I suggested in another comment on this post, external survey tools could be easily used to gather this data or feedback if you or anyone else really think it’s valuable or useful.
I would like to see some evidence about how well those work and how useful that gathered data is before I change my mind about this being useful here.
I don’t want this as I don’t think ‘more feedback’ is particularly useful, valuable, or germane to this site.
I’m also thinking about this request in terms of additional work, and ongoing maintenance, by the site’s developers/maintainers.
I’m also unclear why anyone would want to (seemingly) optimize for such incredibly low-density info as the count of ‘reacts’ on posts. We are mostly – at times explicitly – trying to avoid persuading each other and instead focus on sharing our (detailed) thoughts and feelings so that we can, as a group, reason better. This all seems exactly backwards given that.