6 ms·

I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.

by morder 2y ago

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Genuine question: why?
- cogthrow 2y ago
  Old Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
  - Eggpants 2y ago
    Young’in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go all emo.jpg
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      Imagine thinking being generally sociable and polite is in any way, at all, a negative thing.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  This 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 ago
    feature 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 ago
    Perhaps 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 ago
      Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
      - falcolas 2y ago
        Ironically, 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 ago
        lol
        valcargo 2y ago
        I 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.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        A lot of email communication happens by this same rule. Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people that need to ack a message can just send one, and the client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not bothering anyone. But, of course, every client needs to know about that for it to work.
      - viraptor 2y ago
  - logicprog 2y ago
    Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction. Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      > by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently. If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on. > it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the space. Which brings us back to, "Why?"
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.
      - p51-remorse 2y ago
        This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji like most other people. The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter, because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My proposal here would do just this, but require the sender to do nothing different than before.
      - lkramer 2y ago
        They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their text representation. It's can be misleading because the text representation sometimes diverge from what the user thinks the emoji means.
bandyaboot 2y ago
Honestly 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      If 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.

I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.

by morder 2y ago

I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

Genuine question: why?

cogthrow 2y ago
Old Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
- Eggpants 2y ago
  Young’in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go all emo.jpg
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Imagine thinking being generally sociable and polite is in any way, at all, a negative thing.
ryandrake 2y ago
This 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 ago
  feature 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 ago
  Perhaps 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 ago
    Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
    - falcolas 2y ago
      Ironically, 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 ago
        lol
      - valcargo 2y ago
        I 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.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        A lot of email communication happens by this same rule. Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people that need to ack a message can just send one, and the client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not bothering anyone. But, of course, every client needs to know about that for it to work.
    - viraptor 2y ago
- logicprog 2y ago
  Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction. Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently. If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on. > it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the space. Which brings us back to, "Why?"
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.
    - p51-remorse 2y ago
      This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji like most other people. The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter, because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My proposal here would do just this, but require the sender to do nothing different than before.
    - lkramer 2y ago
      They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their text representation. It's can be misleading because the text representation sometimes diverge from what the user thinks the emoji means.

bandyaboot 2y ago

Honestly 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 ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
    If 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.