I find myself using them on pretty much every platform that has them: matrix, masto, discord, etc.

These would be completely separate from votes, and have no affect on sorting.

What do you think the positives and negatives would be of having them?

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    3 years ago

    All platforms seem to have them now, except they make theirs paid. Think about it: custom emojis linked to your instance that work cross-instances. And why stop there? Use all emojis from other instances that are federated to yours as well. All free, without limitations, for all users.

    Argument 2: they’re just fun.

    Argument 3: reactions can cut down on useless replies. Many forums have had a “thanks” system in place for years before it was popular and I think it helps cut down on “came here to say this” or “+1” replies. Scratches that itch of not being the first one to offer a solution.

    • Peter1986c@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 years ago

      It would not be well-understood by Gen Z. :P

      Millenials are the last gen (in the West) to have grown up with the old-school style of typing emoticons, I think. But that may be just my impression.

  • Thann@lemmy.ml
    7·
    3 years ago

    One possible implementation would be coalescing “single-glyph-responses” into a “reaction count” on the ui-layer. so instead of seeing several identical comments like: 👍, its visually more like slack, but on the backend its just a regular comment 🤔

  • daojones@lemmy.ml
    81·
    3 years ago

    I love them because it gives you a succinct way to reply without having to type out a response.

  • poVoq@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 years ago

    I don’t think they are necessary per-se, but would be nice for cross-system federation, similar to how polls like in Mastodon aren’t really necessary in Lemmy, but would be still nice to have.

  • Maya@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 years ago

    I do love them, but it’d be hard for them to not get real visually noisy. Also they’d need to be moddable (ex: racists using monkey emojis to harass). Also would they be anonymous the way vote counts are? I think they’re a really fun feature but need careful thought before UI incorporation. (ooh, maybe they’d make sense to keep pretty small and have in a similar position to where Reddit puts comment gilding?)

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOP
      6·
      3 years ago

      For the UI, I was thinking they’d look similar to discord reactions, small, grouped, and at the bottom:

      I was originally thinking anonymous, but I never thought of ppl using them for nefarious purposes…

  • tmpodMA
    5·
    3 years ago

    I think they could be added, as long as they can be visually disabled in clients, for people that don’t want the clutter (or maybe neatly hide them away, while still being in reach if needed). Also, custom emojis for sure, even in text content.

    • Maya@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 years ago

      Federating custom emojis is Quite A Thing, if I understand correctly

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          3 years ago

          I have to look into how reactions work in activitypub before proceeding… if its an attachment that’s a just a picture url, then technically any picture would work.

          • gun@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 years ago

            Mastodon already has custom emojis. I’m not sure how it works, but it would probably best to look at their approach.

  • CHEF-KOCH@lemmy.ml
    5·
    3 years ago

    GitHub also adopted it, and I would say it depends on the platform and target.

    For a developer platform I find this unprofessional, but for traditional chat systems it might be useful if you quickly want to go through lots of messages and get a first impression about what the community thinks about topic X.

    On Lemmy I would prefer emojis to up and down votes, the reason is that people often do not bother to explain why they up or down voted it.

    I would argue, overall, that adding it puts maybe a bit more pressure on the server for no actual benefit.

    I overall would like such a feature here on Lemmy but only if there are limits how you can use them, I speculate some people would constantly add and then remove them with might cause some more traffic and pressure on the server, so there should be a limit. Unregistered people should not be allowed to add reaction or use them, only one reaction per post or within x hours… and such limitations.

    • tmpodMA
      4·
      3 years ago

      For a developer platform I find this unprofessional

      I know I’m off-topic, but why is it so? I find them rather neat, as they allow for quick and concise responses (yes, no, agree, disagree, interesting, curious, yay, gj, etc).

        • tmpodMA
          3·
          3 years ago

          Some emojis are pretty much universal, while others clearly aren’t. The ones in GitHub’s selection are pretty normal, with exception of the thumbs-up/down I suppose (reading from that article). It’s really a matter of context. In most cases, the use of emoji reactions is fine and brings benefits.
          If someone isn’t okay with them, I think they should politely ask their colleagues to stop using them, which is, in my opinion, a better compromise than just not having reactions altogether.