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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

I value my attention. I don't spent it on artificially generated responses. If someone wants to communicate with me I insist they put in some minimum level of effort. Before email, it took work to write a letter, which helped weed out low signal-to-noise communiques. Messages the likes of spam, LLM-generated content, and reactions go straight to my trash folder. I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message.

It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day and it's a necessary filter.

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> "I don't spent it on artificially generated responses"

This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a nod and a thumbs-up.

> "I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message."

If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem, this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's nice).

Personally, reactions serve as a fast signal for “acknowledged” that spares me having to see a new email that says “Ok”.

I think read receipts may be a better solution for what most people seem to use the reaction buttons for. Then again, I don't really care either way. I can see the value of email reactions, but that does require clients to build in support for the standard.

The text fallback also isn't great, I'd much rather they'd sendan email with nothing but the emoji than "person X reacted to your message". I suppose this is more corporate-compliant?

The problem with read receipts is that (1) it’s useful for spammers to see that their email went through, and (2) I don’t want to automatically share with people when I read the email or instant message, so i would turn off the feature even if spam wasn’t an issue.

You prefer an automatically generated read receipt that basically means "this person clicked somewhere in their client, it happened to open the email, maybe they read it, maybe it was an accident" to "this person read your email and consciously decided to acknowledge it and chose a particular 'reaction' to hint at what they mean"? Really?

Reading an email doesn’t mean accepting an email.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a big user of outlook, but I use reactions a lot in chat.

I like receiving reactions specifically because they save me time. When I get a typed message, I often take time to think through whether the sender is expecting some sort of acknowledgement (confirming that I got their message letting me know that I’m welcome to thank them again any time!) or whether it’s polite to terminate the exchange by not responding. Overall, I spend far more time than I’d like second-guessing my words. When I just get a reaction, it serves as a form of acknowledgement that doesn’t demand further response and frees me from an obligation.

Geez. You complain about disrespect, and then you explain you want everyone to cater to your particular requirements and waste their own time (instead of using the feature designed to save everyone's time) because you... "value your attention"?

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