It seems like an awkward bit of information-architecture design, though, doesn’t it?
I mean, for some of the reactions, it does, actually, make sense to anti-react to them directly, “from scratch”, as it were. Anti-“Insightful” clearly means “not insightful”, anti-“Virtue of Scholarship” can mean “this should exhibit the virtue of scholarship but fails to do so”, anti-“Clear” and anti-“Hits the Mark” and anti-“Exciting” also all have fairly clear meanings even when not reacting to their regular (non-reversed) versions.
Now, for one thing, that this is the case for some of the reacts but not others seems like it’s bound to lead to confusion and weirdness.
For another thing, it seems like making it easy to directly anti-react with the reactions I list above… should be fairly easy to access via the UI, given that it’s clearly meaningful to do so. But this would also (as currently designed) make it easier to directly anti-react with “Wrong” or “Shrug” or whatever, which seems less than ideal.
This seems to me to suggest that the conceptual design of the feature might need some work.
We had an earlier iteration of the design where each react was basically a dimension where it made sense to have positives and negatives, and it IMO constrained the space of reacts too much.
The primary point of the anti-react system is as a corrective system that I expect to be used relatively rarely (but that I do think is important to exist). While I agree that some reactions have meaningful opposites that one might be tempted to express with an anti-react, the right thing to do IMO is to provide another react with the opposite meaning, so that you can see them both side-by-side.
This seems right to me since e.g. if someone were to use anti-excitement to indicate “this is draining” there’d then be an issue of how someone else might see this and then wonder how best to express they think it’s actually pretty neutral rather than draining (since, while excitement cancels out anti-excitement, indicating excitement itself wouldn’t be truth-tracking in this case).
It seems like an awkward bit of information-architecture design, though, doesn’t it?
I mean, for some of the reactions, it does, actually, make sense to anti-react to them directly, “from scratch”, as it were. Anti-“Insightful” clearly means “not insightful”, anti-“Virtue of Scholarship” can mean “this should exhibit the virtue of scholarship but fails to do so”, anti-“Clear” and anti-“Hits the Mark” and anti-“Exciting” also all have fairly clear meanings even when not reacting to their regular (non-reversed) versions.
Now, for one thing, that this is the case for some of the reacts but not others seems like it’s bound to lead to confusion and weirdness.
For another thing, it seems like making it easy to directly anti-react with the reactions I list above… should be fairly easy to access via the UI, given that it’s clearly meaningful to do so. But this would also (as currently designed) make it easier to directly anti-react with “Wrong” or “Shrug” or whatever, which seems less than ideal.
This seems to me to suggest that the conceptual design of the feature might need some work.
We had an earlier iteration of the design where each react was basically a dimension where it made sense to have positives and negatives, and it IMO constrained the space of reacts too much.
The primary point of the anti-react system is as a corrective system that I expect to be used relatively rarely (but that I do think is important to exist). While I agree that some reactions have meaningful opposites that one might be tempted to express with an anti-react, the right thing to do IMO is to provide another react with the opposite meaning, so that you can see them both side-by-side.
This seems right to me since e.g. if someone were to use anti-excitement to indicate “this is draining” there’d then be an issue of how someone else might see this and then wonder how best to express they think it’s actually pretty neutral rather than draining (since, while excitement cancels out anti-excitement, indicating excitement itself wouldn’t be truth-tracking in this case).