My experience in other circles with Slack and Discord is that the niche of emoji reactions is primarily non-interrupting room-sensing (there are also sillier uses in casual social contexts, but they don’t seem relevant here). I don’t feel any pressure to specifically have read something, and I haven’t observed people reading anything into failure to provide a reaction. The rare exception to the latter is when there’s clearly an active conversation going on that someone’s already clearly been active in, which can be handled by explicitly signaling departure, which was a norm in those circumstances anyway.
Non-interrupting room-sensing in a fast-flowing channel environment has generally struck me as beneficial. Being able to quickly find the topic-flow of the current conversation is important, and reactions do not have to be scanned for topic introductions. Reactions encode leafness: you can’t reply to a reaction easily, which also means giving a reaction cannot induce social pressure to reply to it. They encode weaker ties to the individual: people with the same reaction are stacked together, and it takes an extra effort to look at the list of reacting users. Differentially, reactions can also signal level of involvement: someone “conversing” in only reactions may not be up for thinking about the conversation hard enough to produce text responses, but is able to listen and give base emotional feedback (which seems to be the most relevant to the proposed uses here). It serves a similar function to scanning people’s facial expressions in a physical meeting room.
I’m very unclear on how these patterns would play out in a longer-form, more delay-tolerant environment like a comment tree. Some of the room-sensing interpretation makes less sense the less the timescale of the reactions corresponds to unconscious-emotion synchronization; there’s a lot of lost flow context.
My experience in other circles with Slack and Discord is that the niche of emoji reactions is primarily non-interrupting room-sensing (there are also sillier uses in casual social contexts, but they don’t seem relevant here). I don’t feel any pressure to specifically have read something, and I haven’t observed people reading anything into failure to provide a reaction. The rare exception to the latter is when there’s clearly an active conversation going on that someone’s already clearly been active in, which can be handled by explicitly signaling departure, which was a norm in those circumstances anyway.
Non-interrupting room-sensing in a fast-flowing channel environment has generally struck me as beneficial. Being able to quickly find the topic-flow of the current conversation is important, and reactions do not have to be scanned for topic introductions. Reactions encode leafness: you can’t reply to a reaction easily, which also means giving a reaction cannot induce social pressure to reply to it. They encode weaker ties to the individual: people with the same reaction are stacked together, and it takes an extra effort to look at the list of reacting users. Differentially, reactions can also signal level of involvement: someone “conversing” in only reactions may not be up for thinking about the conversation hard enough to produce text responses, but is able to listen and give base emotional feedback (which seems to be the most relevant to the proposed uses here). It serves a similar function to scanning people’s facial expressions in a physical meeting room.
I’m very unclear on how these patterns would play out in a longer-form, more delay-tolerant environment like a comment tree. Some of the room-sensing interpretation makes less sense the less the timescale of the reactions corresponds to unconscious-emotion synchronization; there’s a lot of lost flow context.