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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of adding more expressiveness, pictorially capturing sometimes fleeting moments of emotion or accurately representing an emotional state that can occur.

These are the following reactions:

  1. +1
  2. -1
  3. smile
  4. thinking_face
  5. heart
  6. tada

Do they capture the necessary expressiveness for the context? Facebook's reactions cover more emotions, but FB is trying to support reaction to anything that can be posted.

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Considering that it's Github, how about things relevant to software engineering, like: agree, disagree, support, insightful, obsolete, misleading. I can't imagine it being helpful to know that someone felt "heart" about an issue comment.

Heart is probably a supersized +1 for pull requests and a nod to Aaron Peterson.

who is aaron peterson? Googling that name results in a photographer,a lawyer and a bunch of doctors.

aaron patterson, aka @tenderlove. rails and ruby core contributor.

[edit: at least that's who I presume the GP meant]

Perhaps he meant Aaron Patterson (https://github.com/tenderlove) "tenderlove"? Not sure.

this was my initial reaction is well. It seems like this will just add to the noise and not help large open source projects get work done.

I was a little surprised that neither :ship: nor :shipit: made the list; it seems like these frequently show up in discussions as well.

Right, more domain-specific options would make sense.

I recently wrote a post about Facebook Reactions and if it would be effective at helping quantify sentiment. (http://minimaxir.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions/) The tl;dr is that I believe that Reactions are redundant outside of positive/negative classification.

GitHub actually has both +1 and -1, which satisfies me. But there's not much productive purpose with a smile/heart/tada other than to be quirky. (The thinking_face is neutral and adds nothing in this aspect)

Yeah, as I asked below: Will this be a meaningful form of communication and is the language (subset of images) sufficient? Can small changes like this perhaps change how PRs, Comments, etc are treated? Will it be productive, a distraction, or a NOOP?

All I want is slack's :partyparrot: and I'm satisfied.

You may be interested to know that :partyparrot: is not built-into Slack, someone on your team had to add it: http://cultofthepartyparrot.com/

...which I just did to my team's Slack.

Four positive, one neutral, one negative. Balanced?

Where is the sadface to go with smile? The warface to go with heart? Or the facepalm to go with party?

I don't understand why they limited it to six responses rather than just letting you search for one and use it (the same way slack does)?

I actually don't have :thinking_face: but have :confused: instead.

I think GitHub wanted an option to express "I don't understand this," and decided :confused: was a better fit. Which makes sense, because :thinking_face: could mean "I'm considering this" or "Interesting point," which is not, I think, what that option is meant to convey.

Eh...what's the point?

I think the point is: Will this be a meaningful form of communication and is the language (subset of images) sufficient? Can small changes like this perhaps change how PRs, Comments, etc are treated? Will it be productive, a distraction, or a NOOP? Would you use this feature or have you used a feature like this?

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