14 ms·
I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positiv
by p51-remorse 2y ago
I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
- morder 2y agoI would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoGenuine question: why?
- cogthrow 2y agoOld Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
- Eggpants 2y agoYoung’in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go all emo.jpg
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoImagine thinking being generally sociable and polite is in any way, at all, a negative thing.
- ryandrake 2y agoThis question is how we get opinionated software that slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it" should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a feature.
- fragmede 2y agofeature of the software being software, sure, but when there's a human on the other side, it's different when it's within a small group context.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoPerhaps it would be better to ask, how do you expect people to communicate to you those things that would be expressed as reactions?
- valcargo 2y agoUsing words. Same as here on Hacker News.
- falcolas 2y agoIronically, since HN tends to dislike short content-less posts, which means quite often unless we have something more to say, we do not respond at all. That is, there is no ack signal.
- saagarjha 2y agolol
- valcargo 2y agoI know of a few company cultures like this. You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected. Everything else is just noise, and employees tend to keep the noise level quite low.
- falcolas 2y ago> You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected. Unfortunately, I work with humans and technology, both of whom are fallible. As such, reminders and prompts are occasionally required. Being able to tell if a message was received, read, and understood is a very useful signal.
- bandyaboot 2y agoHonestly if someone were to send me a message that only required a simple acknowledgement, and that person hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged. But I suspect what you’re really wanting is typed acknowledgment?
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoI would probably just send the emote I would react with as a single-letter answer. If I have nothing to say beyond "thumbs up emoji" the fact that you don't like reactions doesn't, by virtue of your opinion, give me anything more interesting to say in return.
- mavhc 2y agoI don't want my messages acknowledged, it's just The Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know, otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say Thanks, you're paying me to do it
- latexr 2y ago> I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know You’ve replaced “read” in the first part with “agree” in the second, and those are not at all the same thing. I can’t let you know that I haven’t read your message. If a parent says to the other “hey, I’m running late, I need you to pick up Tiny Tim from school”, an acknowledgement is paramount even if you read, understood, and agreed to the message. > it's just The Generals Problem. That problem is concerned with an unreliable communication channel, which does not apply to the situation.
- mavhc 2y agoIf the channel is reliable why would I need to know if you've read my message? and why would you tell me in another message? The problem isn't the acknowledgement, it's the additional steps I have to make to acknowledge the acknowledgement to the email system. Eg Whatsapp has 1 tick for sent, 2 for received, and turns them blue for opened.
- utensil4778 2y agoIt should be entirely socially acceptable to respond to any trivial message with "ACKNOWLEDGED" á la Picard
- TeMPOraL 2y agoI agree. Also, if the message proposes any action, it should be appropriate to reply with "Make it so.".
- xenophonf 2y agoBRB hacking "Engage!" into https://github.com/marketplace/actions/manual-workflow-approval https://github.com/marketplace/actions/manual-workflow-appro...
- freitasm 2y agoWhat is wrong with "Roger" and "Wilco"? These are shorter. And remind me of the voice chat program Roger Wilco too.
- OJFord 2y agoWell 'ack' is even shorter, and the common form of 'ACKNOWLEDGED' for such use. I've seen & used both ack & wilco in a technical/software chat context.
- tczMUFlmoNk 2y agoI use this, though I find that many folks, including many technical folks, interpret it as an exclamation of distaste (as in, "agh! ach! ack!"), so it may pay to be judicious.
- OJFord 2y agoOh interesting, I have come across that, but only one person (both uses it like that and misinterpreted it when we worked with people that ack'd, which of course I saw coming & could explain since I was accustomed to his use) - didn't realise that was common too. (I would use agh/argh/ugh for that personally, depending on precise feeling(!))
- JohnFen 2y agoI agree. I'm not anti-reactions. I'm anti-reactions in email.
- santoshalper 2y agoI don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like that outside onto the public internet is absurd.
- signal11 2y agoGmail has had this feature since 2023: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
- olyjohn 2y agoYou keep posting this over and over. So what? Is it supposed the be okay because Google does it too?
- signal11 2y ago> over and over I replied thrice because I was surprised to read commenters replies as if Outlook introduced a new unheard-of feature. Including an interop related question I thought about later, because I still can’t understand why emojis involve loading images. I found the thread too late to develop a well researched post and so commented as I read. Sorry if it offends your sensibilities. But why are you policing how I comment? :-) Also, why Gmail is important: It’s a fairly major email provider so it sort of matters when they deployed this. Two market majors having a feature usually implies others will follow suit — eventually. > is it supposed to be okay This assumes so much. I’ll turn this around. Why’s it not okay? I can’t see any RFC that forbids this. It’s not a feature I’m interested in but I think it’s interesting that email is evolving to match what users are used to on Slack, Teams, WhatsApp etc. And (software) evolution is something I’m very interested in.
- signal11 2y agoGmail now has emoji reactions too. Eg see the smiley face here: https://imgur.com/a/0cYSLMQ https://imgur.com/a/0cYSLMQ They launched it last year[1]. [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
- Hnrobert42 2y agoMy friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to happen anyway.
- pwillia7 2y agowilco
- not_kurt_godel 2y agoConcur without comment.
- ensignavenger 2y agoI usually shorten it to simply "I concur", if no comment follows, it is a given. Maybe if you are using a lossy message format where a potential comment might get left out it would be necessary to make that part clear, but for most things it is a given.
- pirates 2y agoack
- Hnrobert42 2y agoA friend you didn't understand me once said RST ACK. I lost it.
- boingo 2y ago"ya"
- cmg 2y agoEven in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in. Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
- reaperducer 2y agoReplaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. We've had macros on computers since at least the 1980's. Just pick your standard acknowledgement and bind it to a hotkey, or a text expansion. On macOS: Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…
- OptionOfT 2y agoI don't like it in Slack as it gives another avenue for out of sequence communication. When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email. In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you. This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading? When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough. Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress. In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not. Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels. Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.