7 ms·

Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as d

• JohnFen 2y ago
  In email, it would just be an annoyance that bulks out the inbox. Not a huge deal, but filtering them out would improve the experience. Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't really add anything.
• xenophonf 2y ago
  It isn't materially different than replying "OK" in that both a thumb's-up notification and an "OK" reply both act as distractions from whatever meaningful activity I'm engaging in, the same with all the DINGS and BUZZES and BANNERS and POP UPS that vie for my precious attention. I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be. Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value. /rant
  • p51-remorse 2y ago
    This is actually something I like about Slack’s implementation: reactions don’t generate notifications.
    • yoyoyo1122 2y ago
      You can disable reaction notifications in Teams too but it's not the default option.
• whyoh 2y ago
  I, just like the blog author, disable remote images in emails. So I wouldn't get the "intended experience" anyway. Actually, does anyone besides Outlook users get the intended experience here? Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward. So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
  • signal11 2y ago
    I wonder if Gmail and Outlook interop on Emoji Reactions. Gmail launched the feature in 2023[1]. I’ve personally not used the feature but emojis shouldn’t be images — they are after all Unicode code points. Not sure why MS’s implementation uses images at all. [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
  • dylan604 2y ago
    > Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward. Another old dog refusing to learn a new trick. If you want to talk about not part of email culture, let's not forget images weren't part of the original. So people got over that. They embraced it just like they embraced HTML emails and everything else. You can stand in the middle of the stream, but it's just going to go right on by you
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      Not everyone embraced it. I still use a plain-text email client.
      • g15jv2dp 2y ago
        In case you haven't realized, you're the odd one out, today, in 2024. I don't mean this in a negative way - I just mean that you're out of what's usual.
        • 2y ago
• rkagerer 2y ago
  I value my attention. I don't spent it on artificially generated responses. If someone wants to communicate with me I insist they put in some minimum level of effort. Before email, it took work to write a letter, which helped weed out low signal-to-noise communiques. Messages the likes of spam, LLM-generated content, and reactions go straight to my trash folder. I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message. It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day and it's a necessary filter.
  • Dalewyn 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    > "I don't spent it on artificially generated responses" This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a nod and a thumbs-up. > "I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message." If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem, this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's nice).
  • BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
    Personally, reactions serve as a fast signal for “acknowledged” that spares me having to see a new email that says “Ok”.
    • jeroenhd 2y ago
      I think read receipts may be a better solution for what most people seem to use the reaction buttons for. Then again, I don't really care either way. I can see the value of email reactions, but that does require clients to build in support for the standard. The text fallback also isn't great, I'd much rather they'd sendan email with nothing but the emoji than "person X reacted to your message". I suppose this is more corporate-compliant?
• akira2501 2y ago
  I like using them but I hate that they leave the "campus" automatically.
  • lvturner 2y ago
    Agreed - I find it a very nice way to effectively send a "Thanks" email internally without cluttering the recipient's inbox with "Thanks" emails... but this only makes sense to me for internal mails/workflows.
• conductr 2y ago
  It’s usually unnecessary and triggers notifications stealing my attention. If I silence them I might miss some actual change in conversation status. (Eg. Someone asks a question and the answer is in the form of a thumbs down reaction, if notifications are off I am unwittingly waiting for the answer until I check the conversation again) Usually on multiple devices. That said, they are fine when on certain mediums. Chat and slack type stuff where it’s sync conversations that’s fine (although on larger groups and at work it starts becoming an asynchronous bulletin board more than a chat). Email is asynchronous and I only need the final response if the conversation even requires one. If I’m asking you a question I don’t need an acknowledgment reaction followed by an answer 3 hours later. Just send the answer 3 hours later. If I asked you a question and said I needed an answer quickly, you could say I can’t get it to you for 3 hours or if you never say anything I’m going to assume you won’t be answering me (that’s ok!) but if you acknowledge it I will assume you’re working on the quick response I asked for and if o don’t get it I’ll probably be upset or wondering what the problem is. Anyways, in general we’ve built up a lot of norms for various mediums. Email norms don’t need to follow chat norms.
• mrweasel 2y ago
  Two issues: It's not a standard, Microsoft just did this with the assumption that most people are using Outlook anyway. They didn't care how this would work for everyone else. Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context, culture or mood or the recipient. There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions" in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers have all the hallmarks of a hack.
• lkramer 2y ago
  I am not anti reaction as such, especially when it's just a thumbs up, although I very seldom use it myself. However I really struggle with emojis as a general concept. I don't understand a lot of them, and it seems people put a lot of hidden meaning into them that I have to interpret, and I feel the cognitive load is a lot bigger than if people would just type out what the fuck they are trying to say.
  • JohnFen 2y ago
    I think that the issue with emojis is that they're a kind of slang. Because of that, what they mean, exactly, is very dependent on the social circle they exist in. When my friends use emojis, I know what they mean because I know them and the in-group slang we use. When a stranger or acquaintance uses emojis, the only way to know what they're trying to say is through context clues, like with any other unfamiliar slang. So if someone I don't know well is using emojis, I just ignore the ones whose meaning aren't obvious given the context. If I think they're trying to say something important, I'll ask outright what they meant (and then get an understanding of how they use emojis and so are better able to understand them in the future.)
• frumiousirc 2y ago
  It isn't distasteful, it is harmful. I asked a question recently to someone and got a "like" back as the "answer". I then spent one minute pondering wtf this message even was (it was the first of its kind that I received) and another pondering wtf the respondent meant as the question was not of the form "do you like XXX?". This "feature", at least in this case, was not a form of communication of but a disruptive form of confusion. This "feature" is not just distasteful but actively harmful and anti to accepted email communication norms. On Slack it's annoying enough but it's a norm so it is merely distasteful. In email, I see it as yet another EEE method from Microsoft.
  • snapcaster 2y ago
    I guess i fail to see how your example is different from someone responding with "K" or some other equally unhelpful non-reaction response
    • Gormo 2y ago
      "K" is usually a short form of "okay", which is either an affirmative response to a yes/no question, or an acknowledgment of receiving an informmational message, depending on context. In most cases, this is a useful response. Asking a question and getting "I like your question" as the sole response is incredibly obnoxious.
      • 9dev 2y ago
        Are you seriously telling me you’re interpreting a thumb up emoji as a literal I like X, instead of applying a little common sense and infer that they probably meant to say „okay“ with that?
        • Gormo 2y ago
          I suppose I'd interpret an thumbs-up emoji as "okay" if that were what I saw, but when the server is translating that into an email response that says someone liked my last email, that muddles things up quite a bit.
• mihaaly 2y ago
  Not anti-reaction, but against instant message style reaction in email! Don't smear in what is not there, it was not about abolishing reactions from the universe, those have their place still! Like bicycle bells go with your bicycle not with a horse.
• lupusreal 2y ago
  If you can't be assed to actually write something out, then why should anybody else think your reaction worthy of their time? If it wasn't worth anything to you, then it isn't worth anything to me.
• Gormo 2y ago
  > Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? No, it's exactly the opposite. "Reaction" responses are irrelevant noise that clogs up the communication channel and wastes other people's time and attention. People don't usually manually type these sorts of reactions because doing so is not often worth the effort. But this feature eliminates the friction, and encourages people to engage in behavior that is effectively spamming.