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Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

No, that does not solve the issue. You still receive 'reaction' emails but in addition, the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick. They are in some way correct, since they likely did not know they had sent an irritating email but you do.

The truth is, this is just another embrace-extend-extinguish strategy by Microsoft. Their business ethos is, and has been for decades, to make it irritating to use software not written, and controlled, by themselves.

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> the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick

Funny you should say that. I think that people who cause me to recieve an irritating email with nothing more than "like [person] reacted to your message" are dicks. They are sending me an email phrased like there's some third-party intermediary keeping me at arms length e.g. "Mr Blenkinsop wishes it be known that he is aware of your recent correspondance and is approving of its tone."

If you can't fix the real problem - Microsoft and their gamification of email - you can correct the views of people who think that "liking" an email is OK, which to be clear it is not. Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.

You need a similarly hostile user education to stop thoughtless people wasting your time in chat clients -- the moment they say "hello", and then nothing else, send them a link to https://nohello.net/ to let them know they have just been rude and inconsiderate.

Microsoft has prior history for inventing Microsoft-only shit that fucks up other mail ecosystems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...

> Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.

shakes fist at clouds

Seriously, though, this argument seems kind of silly. Do you not usually use words to chat? It’s fine that you don’t like this in your email but your reasoning is specious. “Chat is for emojis. Email is for words.”

Whether I like it or not, it seems that the modern chat client (e.g. Discord or Slack, not IRC) has developed the expectance that you "react" to chat messages as they happen - because there's a mental model that you're literally "chatting" with someone, and not showing you're listening is a faux pas, so the minimum effort response is a "react", especially thumbs-up just to mean "I saw this message and have no further comment on it"

You can of course chat in email, but it's unusual, there's usually a higher bar to responding; it would be madness if every email had everyone else in the chain send another email saying "I've read this", so that's not what people do. I only see "I've read this" emails if the penultimate email concluded the topic and that was all that's left to say. Hence why it's unwelcome to bring the habits of chat clients to email.

I don't think it is specious. Email == electronic mail, if someone sent you a letter you'd not send a reaction back, you'd sent a reply letter. But companies have been trying for years to make email more like a chat app. Threads come to mind. I I prefer folders over tags too.

Sorry, no. You’re trying to carve out some special use case for email as if it’s primary use is formal communication. Email is used for everything from formal business communication to friendly chats to fwd:fwd:fwd: Grandma’s chain letters.

On the other side, text messages are essentially just small emails and your argument against “reactions” applies equally.

We'll have to agree to disagree. For me, and the way I use these things, emails are formal, text/chat is informal. I've never and will never use email like a chat.

If someone was attempting to use email as such with me, they'd likely be getting no reaction at all.

Haha, nearly all the people willing to email me likely know I'm a dick.

What is the “extinguish” here?

other email services

And exactly how would this ever extinguish other email services?

So, its a long game - make it generally irritating for people to use other services. Every time they introduce a feature, make it opaque and difficult to implement. Other services, other MUA's have a hard time keeping up. The users get frustrated that things dont work: "I don't get these stupid emails in Outlook" "LibreOffice doesn't display my document the same" "Firefox doesn't show the page properly" => "Can we just use Outlook/Word/Edge"

> Every time they introduce a feature, make it opaque and difficult to implement.

Is that the case here? It sounds from my limited understanding like this is not difficult to implement and is even easier to turn off.

I understand the EEE model and the concerns with it. I just don’t think this fits that model. This is just a feature.

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