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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it would be better to ask, how do you expect people to communicate to you those things that would be expressed as reactions?

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When the medium is email, I’m not expecting a reaction as it’s async communication method and if they want to react it’s in a form of another email reply. Occasionally I need a confirmation or something and I ask for it in the email, if they just gave me a thumbs up it becomes uncertain if it’s a confirmation because I’ve learned that some people thumbs up everything just to acknowledge it and I later find out they just want to signal they’re online and on top of things but actually never read my message

Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.

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.

lol

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.

> 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.

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.

Ok. (Followed by 20 other people responding with just "ok", filling the screen with spam)

I genuinely think that in this situation, you should do NOTHING instead of reaction. If the explicit ok is not needed, like on HN, then thumps up are not needed either.

It's a contrived situation but does represent a more general set of conversations where the need for response may be more ambiguous. There's a space where acknowledgements and reactions are useful without breaking the flow of conversation.

Ok.

Hacker News does have some reactions - upvote, downvote, flag.

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