Basically my theory is that reactions should be clearly personal reactions and stuff that can’t be objected to (e.g. I can’t object if you found my presentation overcomplicated, that’s just how you felt about it), and anything that can be read as a bid to make claims should not be included because there’s no easy way to respond to a reaction. I think on this grounds I also dislike the strawman and seems borderline reactions.
Regarding “overcomplicated” it seems to me there is an ambiguity between whether it refers to the presentation or the underlying ideas. Perhaps “muddled” could be used refer to the overcomplication of the presentation, but in that case, it could also suggest that the commenter’s ideas are muddled—and I don’t like the “muddled” name, it seems too judgemental and people might avoid using it to avoid being seen as overly harsh.
I think it would be useful for people to be able to compactly express specific issues that they subjectively think regarding the underlying comment, but a lot of the value would come from them being very precise, and distinguishing between e.g. whether it is the user’s reaction to their (possibly flawed) perception of the ideas represented or just the user’s reaction to the presentation of them alone would be part of that precision.
I think the “no easy way to respond to a reaction” is an important point. Maybe there should be a way to respond to a reaction!
I used the “Seems Borderline” reaction partly because I think things along these lines seem likely useful despite me agreeing that the reactions probably should be focused on subjective opinions, and partly just to be funny since you are objecting to that reaction. Someone downvote my “seems borderline” reaction to test downvoting of reactions!
I think the “no easy way to respond to a reaction” is an important point. Maybe there should be a way to respond to a reaction!
I think in a very complete, robust social media system, reactions might just end up being very short comments that the site lays out in a more compact way (and if a flag is checked, omits immediate mention of the author and aggregates identical reacts with a number by default). The point would be that you could link directly to an interesting reaction, or reply to it, and if you reply to it it can be layed out as a comment the usual way.
Maybe the “muddled” react should be renamed to “confused”, with the intentional ambiguity as to whether the idea itself seems confused or the reactor just found it confusing because they misunderstood something.
That proposal would help to some extent with the possible sentiment issues with “muddled” but I’d still prefer that “muddled” would be split into some more precise reactions. Could also replace “Wrong” perhaps.
Some possibilities:
TL;DR
Unnecessarily wordy [and make “Overcomplicated” specific to the content not form]
Unable to parse
Non sequitur
Ambiguous (i.e. multiple potential meanings)
Disagree with premise(s)
Unclear point
Misrepresentation [could potentially replace “Strawman” but be more general]
So the question arises, is it worth trying to distinguish between these sorts of different things? On the one hand, there’s potentially a lot possible distinctions there that could be tough for a reader to make, but on the other hand I think that precise negative feedback is useful, whereas vague negative feedback is much less so, so I’d be inclined to approve of making it easier to make negative feedback more precise rather than less. On a site aiming for strong epistemic standards, “muddled”/”confused” seems rather vague to me and I doubt it’s that useful to the writer—how do they know what sort of thing they need to fix?
fwiw I’m not sure we need anything new for replying-to-reacts beyond writing a reply-comment saying “this comment has some weird reacts I disagree with, here’s my take”. (it seems like people already do that sometimes with votes, i.e. “I’m surprised people downvoted this”)
I’m not entirely sure I agree but I think “what if reacts were only mapped to internal-action-reactions is an interesting prompt.”
I do think I still want “seems false” or “seems unlikely” – they’re important facets of my reaction to a thing, but the “seems” part feels important.
I do generally feel, looking at the reacts, that they’re slightly the-wrong-type-signature. i.e. I never feel an impulse to say “virtue of scholarship” but I might say “nice scholarship!” or something.
Basically my theory is that reactions should be clearly personal reactions and stuff that can’t be objected to (e.g. I can’t object if you found my presentation overcomplicated, that’s just how you felt about it), and anything that can be read as a bid to make claims should not be included because there’s no easy way to respond to a reaction. I think on this grounds I also dislike the strawman and seems borderline reactions.
Regarding “overcomplicated” it seems to me there is an ambiguity between whether it refers to the presentation or the underlying ideas. Perhaps “muddled” could be used refer to the overcomplication of the presentation, but in that case, it could also suggest that the commenter’s ideas are muddled—and I don’t like the “muddled” name, it seems too judgemental and people might avoid using it to avoid being seen as overly harsh.
I think it would be useful for people to be able to compactly express specific issues that they subjectively think regarding the underlying comment, but a lot of the value would come from them being very precise, and distinguishing between e.g. whether it is the user’s reaction to their (possibly flawed) perception of the ideas represented or just the user’s reaction to the presentation of them alone would be part of that precision.
I think the “no easy way to respond to a reaction” is an important point. Maybe there should be a way to respond to a reaction!
I used the “Seems Borderline” reaction partly because I think things along these lines seem likely useful despite me agreeing that the reactions probably should be focused on subjective opinions, and partly just to be funny since you are objecting to that reaction. Someone downvote my “seems borderline” reaction to test downvoting of reactions!
I think in a very complete, robust social media system, reactions might just end up being very short comments that the site lays out in a more compact way (and if a flag is checked, omits immediate mention of the author and aggregates identical reacts with a number by default). The point would be that you could link directly to an interesting reaction, or reply to it, and if you reply to it it can be layed out as a comment the usual way.
Maybe the “muddled” react should be renamed to “confused”, with the intentional ambiguity as to whether the idea itself seems confused or the reactor just found it confusing because they misunderstood something.
That proposal would help to some extent with the possible sentiment issues with “muddled” but I’d still prefer that “muddled” would be split into some more precise reactions. Could also replace “Wrong” perhaps.
Some possibilities:
TL;DR
Unnecessarily wordy [and make “Overcomplicated” specific to the content not form]
Unable to parse
Non sequitur
Ambiguous (i.e. multiple potential meanings)
Disagree with premise(s)
Unclear point
Misrepresentation [could potentially replace “Strawman” but be more general]
So the question arises, is it worth trying to distinguish between these sorts of different things? On the one hand, there’s potentially a lot possible distinctions there that could be tough for a reader to make, but on the other hand I think that precise negative feedback is useful, whereas vague negative feedback is much less so, so I’d be inclined to approve of making it easier to make negative feedback more precise rather than less. On a site aiming for strong epistemic standards, “muddled”/”confused” seems rather vague to me and I doubt it’s that useful to the writer—how do they know what sort of thing they need to fix?
fwiw I’m not sure we need anything new for replying-to-reacts beyond writing a reply-comment saying “this comment has some weird reacts I disagree with, here’s my take”. (it seems like people already do that sometimes with votes, i.e. “I’m surprised people downvoted this”)
I’m not entirely sure I agree but I think “what if reacts were only mapped to internal-action-reactions is an interesting prompt.”
I do think I still want “seems false” or “seems unlikely” – they’re important facets of my reaction to a thing, but the “seems” part feels important.
I do generally feel, looking at the reacts, that they’re slightly the-wrong-type-signature. i.e. I never feel an impulse to say “virtue of scholarship” but I might say “nice scholarship!” or something.