Proposal: Pick your reaction emojis

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I think you guess incorrectly! This kind of functionality is common in mobile apps (e.g., Signal, Discord, Zoom, etc.) and desktop apps, including web apps, and is fairly effortless to use.

Typically there’s a palette of 5-ish options, plus a ‘more’ option. The ‘more’ option opens up the (searchable) full emoji palette. The 5-ish options are either user-customizable (e.g., Signal App), or reflect frequency of individual user’s use (e.g., Zoom… at least per session). For example, here’s a customized reaction palette from Signal App (the ellipses are the ‘more’ option):

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And viewing just looks like a badge show what reation has been applied to a post. If more than one reaction, you get to see the most recent, or the most common, with a number indicating how many people have responded with, e.g., :fire: or :heart: or whatever. Here’s an example from a conversation I was party to last night (the ‘3’ indicates that many :heart: reactions, there’s one :sunglasses: reaction, and if you click, you can see the 2 remaining reactions, as well as who reacted with what in a little pop-up):

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That was explicitly not done at TOP to prevent potential trolling.

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I did not see that in this thread. Still, removing a few ‘trollish’ emoji from a palette ( :troll: ?) would facilitate greater expression than limiting responses to 10 emoji (or whatever).

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It is far, far easier to whitelist than blacklist. Blacklisting is too delayed and reactionary.

Things like the obvious misogyny and transmisogyny in :eggplant: for example. If you want greater expression, just reply to the comment.

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Like others have mentioned, the cumbersome aspect and potential for trolling. If someone is not satisfied with the limited palette of choices, that is probably an indication they should just reply to the post. Either with the emoji of choice, an appropriate gif, or words.

As someone who primarily uses a phone to visit, a longer list than what @LockeCJ is contemplating would be cumbersome. The ellipsis for choosing might work on a phone. But when clicking to see who reacted with what, it’s probably going to get messy.

Then there is the consideration that 1. Discourse won’t support the ellipsis or ranking by most recent or most common and 2. Even if it did, @LockeCJ is already donating a lot of time to give us this gift and I would really like to avoid asking for more when it isn’t needed

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Can we have a :penguin: ?

ETA: FFS Tim, get down off the chair.
Sorry, was AFK.
Do carry on.

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It seems to me that anti-trolling policies should apply to emoji as well as to text (and images, etc.). (I.e. misogyny should be treated as such whether expressed through emoji or through text.)

Does deeming specific emoji to be “trollish” imply that we should also deem which words to auto-censor in posts and replies for being too “trollish”?

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Giving you a new feature that is smaller than you like is not censorship. We could always just keep the hearts.

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I agree with that. My point is that ‘anti-trolling policy’ does not really make sense as a reason to not include a fully expressive emoji palette, because trolling is not something that only occurs with emoji (or text, or images, etc.), and because we should treat trolling the same regardless of the media of its expression.

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Agreed.

But why add another possibility when it is even easier not to? Why increase the load on the moderators?

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For the same reason we create a forum for people to communicate at all? Because the more tools we have to express ourselves the better?

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I think it’s just simpler to have a limited number of reaction icons for those who don’t want to reply, and leave the full palette to those who do.

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The reaction emojis can be a stealthier way of trolling or bullying than replies. Other users may not notice if an emoji is used in a way to troll to hurt the poster. It isn’t as noticeable. You have to click thru to see who used which emoji as well. You can’t just flag an emoji reaction the way you can flag a pos/reply. Some of the safeguards against trolling or bullying available for a reply aren’t available for reaction emojis. And then there are the emojis that mean something very different to different groups. We have a lot of different kinds of people from lots of different kinds of places. The emojis currently being contemplated are all really straightforward and their meaning universal.
I can see a person using a emoji that has come to mean something hateful as a reaction to the posts of users who are part of marginalized cultures. The person using it knows it means something hateful, the poster (as they are part of the group being hated upon) know it means something hateful. But most of the rest of us don’t. If that emoji is in a reply, it is easily flagged and hidden before much harm can be done. Maybe even before the target knows it is there. If it’s an available reaction, we don’t have that tool.
I can also see someone choosing an emoji reaction that has a meaning they aren’t aware of but is offensive. Or accidently hitting the wrong one in the giant list on a small screen.

Plus limiting the number of reactions available as a knee-jerk response is probably wise. If a person really wants to express their reaction to a post with an emoji not in the short list, requiring they take the extra step of a reply and making that reply immediately visible is a decent way to allow a bit of extra time for thinking before reacting.

It’s not censorship. It’s minimizing the chances for misunderstandings and malicious misuse.

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Here ya go:

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I use Discord a lot and honestly the expended emoji reaction for posts is fine, but ultimately not useful. I felt that the emoji set at the old place and its use was more meaningful than when i see it used in Discord

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I have trouble telling some of these apart, at least with my monitor settings and migraine glasses.

I suppose a minimal set would include 1. thanks for sharing (especially for creative work), 2. thanks, and I’m glad, and 3. thanks and I’m sad/angry/etc.

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Rage :rage:
thank you (not sure best emoji for this - searching suggest ‘pray’ :pray:)
face palm :man_facepalming: :person_facepalming: :woman_facepalming:

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Yeah, see, this was exactly my point bringing up the more button. It works with one, but I don’t think the plug-in we’re using has that and since we’re not the ones coding it, we can’t add it. The fact that the functionality is common doesn’t mean we have it available.

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Misattributed. I wasn’t advocating for prior-restraint, just trying to acknowledge that there may be practical, rather than technical limitations that may make a large number of reaction emoji less useful. As @chenille helpfully points out.

This can’t be a serious suggestion. Unicode defines over 3600 emoji at this current time. The only reasonable interfaces for selection would be similar to the interface for emoji in the post editor:

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Even with that problem solved, planning an interface for what an individual post would look like with potentially hundreds of emoji attached to it sounds dreadful. As an example, here’s what Discord often looks like:
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As much space is taken up with reactions as with the message itself. I’m not sure what value is added by both the 54 rubber duck (not an actual emoji?) reactions in addition to the 7 :duck: reactions.
Hiding overflow via an ellipsis or something similar just hides those reactions for the vast majority anyway, so I’m not sure I see the point.
To paraphrase an old meme:
Sir, this is an Arby’s Discourse.

Also, discussing the implementation for this is largely moot. I’m not the creator of the Discourse plugin, so I can only use it as it was designed. Here’s what (part of) the admin interface for this plugin looks like:

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Each emoji is added one at a time, so this is absolutely not built with hundreds, and certainly not thousands, in mind. I suspect the selection interface is similarly built with a short list in mind.

Here’s the documentation post at meta if you’re interested:

Much of what I wrote above was started before many of the replies. Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts on this as well.

I was not aware of that. That is both unsurprising and deeply disappointing.

I’ll add it to the list.

This is valid. Since this feature is implemented via a community plugin, it is not integrated into all of the other systems that Discourse offers.

Once we have the initial set selected, we can try to choose variants that may help distinguish them, such as using different skin tones for the human figures/hands which also affect the colors of clothing, for example.

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That makes sense!

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