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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember YouTube Reactions? Died because no one used them.

Hell, even BuzzFeed, the pioneer of reaction culture, implemented Reactions but are slowly depreciating them.

The problem is that you can't aggregate them. 1 Like and 4 dislikes = "20% like this". What are you going to do with a bunch of faces to show consensus? And which of those faces am I supposed to use to say this post is filled with misinformation and you shouldn't be spreading it ... Angry? Sad?

Why can't you just have a generic face and a series of mutations for each of the reactions, and then average among the mutations?

It wouldn't really work, but it might be one of those features that drives more engagement because it's "unintentionally" funny.

Like Super Mario 64? https://youtu.be/Nn-Rz6lBGW0

My guess as to what FB will do: treat them all as a "like" with respect to engagement statistics (i.e. do we show this post to more people?)

And simultaneously, use all the emotions to train a ridiculously good sentiment analysis system.

This. They should have worked harder to get useful customer information, that would also benefit the reader. Easily done using multiple scales: Like <-->Dislike Spam <--> More of this, and so on.

They worked well on Path and Slack

Emoticons are different than "engagement" buttons, unless you are talking about a feature I don't know about.

There are so called "reaction" buttons in Slack, easy to add with "Add a reaction" menu item on a message.

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