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Comment by wiether | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure they are talking about their colleagues:

> To me - as someone not in the Microsoft ecosystem

And the fact that they are managing their own Postfix seems pretty clear.

As someone in the MS ecosystem at work, I'm using this feature daily (after thinking that it was stupid in the early days)... but I make sure to only use it with coworkers or partners that I know are in the MS ecosystem.

I 100% understand someone being annoyed when they receive an email telling them that someone added an emoji to their email.

Sometimes during the weekend MS is sending me an email recap of the reactions I received during the week and it pisses me off.

The email reactions should be silent and that's their goal: a quiet ack.

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The problem with this is embrace extend extinguish. The way Microsoft adds features to email that only work well in their ecosystem and annoy everyone else is a clear extend phase in progress

Google is trying a similar strategy with AMP for email[1]. I think we're going to miss interoperable email once it's gone.

[1] https://developers.google.com/workspace/gmail/ampemail

Yeah that's why I didn't quite welcomed the feature at first: that's just MS adding their stuff and not following a standard.

Yeah. I think reactions emojis are just the gen-z version of the subject line:

RE: Here are the plans. Ack <eom>

In that sense they basically make sense and it should be unmysterious that people want them.

That Mail is very different from reactions. A nice thing is that outlook can simply sum up the reactions and show them along the message in a non-intrusive way.

A Mail, even with just a subject takes a lot more space and leads somebody to answer to it which messes up the thread.

The emoji adds some new functionality for sure. That’s just the nature of iterative improvement, right?

> A nice thing is that outlook can simply sum up the reactions and show them along the message in a non-intrusive way.

Yeah, that's why I came to like the feature. It's even visible at two places: in the thread list and on an individual email.

The only downside for now: the choice of emoji is too limited. I want my eggplant emoji! But given the history in Teams, where they started with a limited set of emojis, before adding all of them and finally allowing custom ones, I guess it's coming!

> I think reactions emojis are just the gen-z version

Every time someone tells that something I use and enjoy is "the gen-z version" of something, I'm getting worried: is it me trying to keep-up with the cool kids?

Having a few "gen-z" in my team, I quickly came to the conclusion that trying to profile them in a single group was silly: they all behave differently, like every human ever did.

As someone squarely in gen y. I've had the same feelings about me doing stuff that others are associating with gen z.

I think there may be two things at play here. One is that some people are just bad at adapting to social shifts and assume that everyone is the same way as them. The other is that people have gotten loose with usage of generation terms. So for some older people "gen z" = "person younger than me", while for some younger people "boomer" = "person older than me"

And both of those are problems with the speaker, so now I just ignore them and happily keep on doing the "gen z" things.

Thanks for your perspective, I must say that I agree with you

FWIW I mean just as a thing that gen-z popularized, I don’t think they think they own the idea (well, I hope they don’t, I’m not gen-z and I use them).

Anyway, the oldest gen-z is just about pushing 30 now, so they get to join us lame people with sore backs.

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