I have toyed with the idea of adding reactions to posts but it goes against the ethos I've been trying to instill for a while now. Hearts, likes, thumbs up, they are all minimum viable social actions:
"completely disposable and, in most cases, reliant on no other interaction to initiate"
You don't even have to read something before tapping a button.
They are surrogates for more meaningful, considered responses, a metric we can agonise over – a marker of the approval of others. I can get annoyed when what I think is a good post doesn't get any comments but something thrown out there in five seconds gets a whole thread. This feeling can be amplified enormously if a heart, which takes just a second to interact with, doesn't get clicked?
They may seem like innocent, harmless fun but they can be damaging; better not to add them and antagonise myself.
This might seem like an overreaction (no pun intended) but the idea of minimum viable social actions has irked me for years. I believe that our interactions online should be worth something, should be more meaningful than metrics and anonymous validation.
If I was ever going to add reactions to (b)log-In they would need to work something like this:
- tap the heart
- be presented with a comment box and a message saying "Now tell me why"
- the reaction wouldn't be registered without an explanation
I have mixed feelings about them too.
I think they can be good for those who would never leave a comment but just want to show that they read and appreciated what you'd written.