We’ve had reacts for a couple months now and I’m curious to here, both from old-timers and new-timers, what people’s experience of them was, and how much they shape their expectations/culture/etc.
I received (or at least, noticed receiving) a react for the first time recently, and honestly I found it pretty annoying. It was the ‘I checked, it’s False’ one, which basically feels like a quasi-authoritative, quasi-objective, low effort frowny-face stamp where an actual reply would be much more useful.
Edit: If it was possible to reply directly to the react, and have that response be visible to readers who mouse over the react, that would help on the emotional side. On the practical side, I guess it’s a question of whether, in the absence of reacts, I would have got a real reply or just an unexplained downvote.
Another reason we created reacts is that people would often complain about anonymous downvotes, and reacts were somewhat aiming to be a level-of-effort in between downvote and comment.
It’s hard to tell exactly how this effect has played out—reacts and comments are voting are all super noisy and depend on lots of factors. But I have a general sense that people are comparing both votes and reacts to an idealized ‘people wrote out a substantive comment engaging with me’, when alas people are just pretty busy and that’s not realistic to expect a lot of the time.
I do generally prefer people do in-line reacts rather than whole-comment reacts, since that at least tells you what part of the comment they were reacting to. (Ie select part of the comment and react just to that)
I received (or at least, noticed receiving) a react for the first time recently, and honestly I found it pretty annoying. It was the ‘I checked, it’s False’ one, which basically feels like a quasi-authoritative, quasi-objective, low effort frowny-face stamp where an actual reply would be much more useful.
Edit: If it was possible to reply directly to the react, and have that response be visible to readers who mouse over the react, that would help on the emotional side. On the practical side, I guess it’s a question of whether, in the absence of reacts, I would have got a real reply or just an unexplained downvote.
Another reason we created reacts is that people would often complain about anonymous downvotes, and reacts were somewhat aiming to be a level-of-effort in between downvote and comment.
It’s hard to tell exactly how this effect has played out—reacts and comments are voting are all super noisy and depend on lots of factors. But I have a general sense that people are comparing both votes and reacts to an idealized ‘people wrote out a substantive comment engaging with me’, when alas people are just pretty busy and that’s not realistic to expect a lot of the time.
I do generally prefer people do in-line reacts rather than whole-comment reacts, since that at least tells you what part of the comment they were reacting to. (Ie select part of the comment and react just to that)
Note: you can reply to your own comment and @mention the user who reacted to you to send them a notification.