Reacts now enabled on 100% of posts, though still just experimenting

I have just shipped our first draft of Inline Reacts for comments.

You can mouse over a piece of text on a comment, and a little Add React button will appear off to the right.

If you click on it, you'll see the React palette, and you can then apply the react to that particular string of text. Once you've reacted, the reacted-snippet-of-text will appear with a dotted-underline while you're moused over the comment, and it's corresponding react-icon at the bottom of the comment will also show a dotted outline:

When you hoverover a react, it shows the inline-reacts in the hoverover, and they appear highlightd bright green on the post:

Possibilities for the future

Right now these are only enabled on this open thread. If they seem to be basically working we may give authors the option of using them.

Currently you can +1 individual inline reacts, but not -1 (it was unfortunately a lot gnarlier design-wise to implement anti-reacts for individual inline reacts). If inline reacts turn out to be useful/popular, and anti-reacting gets validated as useful, we'll likely figure out a way to implement that.

I'd like to make the dotted-line-sections highlight their corresponding react button when you hoverover them, but that was also a bit trickier codewise.

Questions

Some particular questions I have:

• how intuitive do you find this overall?
• how do you feel about the current implementation of the "dotted underline". Is it annoying to look at? It only appears while you're mousing over the comment so it's possible to read the comment without the react-underlines, but I wasn't sure how that was going to feel in real life.
• how are you currently feeling about anti-reacts?

Quick feedback,

• The icons aren't all obviously interpretable to me
  • Not a crux — looks like a +, rec: ‘crux’ plus ‘🚫’
  • Please elaborate — unclear that it's a request, rec: ‘..?’
  • What's your prediction — rec: ‘$P\left(x\right)?$’
  • Examples, please — rec: ‘ex?’
  • Additional questions — rec: ‘??’
  • Obtuse — rec: remove
• Some reactions seem tonally unpleasant:
  • Not what I meant — idea is good, but icon is accusatory
  • I already addressed this — icon is good, text could be ‘addressed elsewhere’
  • Muddled — maybe replace with ‘Unclear’?
  • Obtuse — maybe replace with ‘Too Long’?
  • Not worth getting into — feels like a meaner version of Not Planning to Respond
  • Note that I do like some critical reactions as-is, like Too Many Assumptions
• There are too many to remember easily; perhaps
  • remove some partial redundancies, like Shrug + Seems Borderline?
  • add one-word summaries to the icon box, like [🕑 discussed 4]?
  • make it easier to see descriptions on mobile?
• I think a top level grouping like this could make sense:
  • Positive ­— eg. Thanks, Important, Exciting, Clear
  • Critical — eg. Taboo, Harsh, Non Sequitur
  • Informational — eg. Will/Won't Reply Later, Agree to This, Shrug
• There should be a Bikeshed emoji, for comments like this one

Most of the reactions are either positive of negative, but if a comment has several reactions, I find it difficult to see immediately which are positive and which are negative. I’m not sure if this is a disadvantage, because it is slightly harder to get peoples overall valuation of the comment, or if it actually an advantage because you can’t get the pleasure/pain of learning the overall reaction to your comment without first learning the specific reasons for it.

Another issue, if we (as readers of the reactions) tend to group reaction into positive and negative is that it is possible to make several reaction to a comment. It means that if 3 people have left positive reactions, a single person can outweigh that by leaving 3 different negative reaction. A reader would only realise this by hovering over the reactions. I do think it is useful to be able to have more than one reaction, especially in cases where you have both positive and negative feedback, or where one of them is neutral (e.g. “I will repond later”), so I’m not sure if there is a good solution to this.

Finally, a multi-karma (well, multi-vote) system!

Idea: we "highlight" or otherwise visually indicate reacts from the author of a post.

I turned this on for a recent post and I'm incredibly impressed. 

This is the coolest feature I've seen for discussion software in many years.

Highly recommended to try it out if you make a post.

I think 'please restate yourself using different terminology, taboo your key words because they have confusing overloaded meanings' is a good concept to have but that we really shouldn't represent it with a 'hush' symbol. That's more like a symbol that means 'be quiet, stop saying what you are saying'. What we mean is more like the 'recycle' symbol, please say the same thing but in a different way so that we can understand each other more clearly.

I'm not sure about the reacts having such specific assigned meanings. It feels a bit like the James Scott perfectly legible straight lines thing (vs self-organizing meaning). Also they'd be more readable with color, even though that seems "less serious" somehow...

↑ comment by Ruby · 2023-06-03T17:33:40.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

color??

Maybe some reacts, such as "Will reply later", should not support negative reacts.

Testing comment. Feel free to react to this however you like, I won’t intrepret the reactions as giving feedback to the comment.

↑ comment by Sune · 2023-05-29T19:33:29.988Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Can you only react with -1 of a reaction if someone else has already reacted with the +1 version of the reaction?

Replies from: Ruby

↑ comment by Ruby · 2023-05-29T19:35:51.950Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Actually if you first +1 to apply it yourself, you can then hover and then downvote it. But it will only show up if you hover.

Replies from: mruwnik

↑ comment by mruwnik · 2023-06-01T14:55:51.437Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

But there is no way to downvote a reaction? E.g. if you add the paperclip reaction, then all I can do is bump it by one and/or later remove my reaction, but there is no way to influence your one? So reactions are strictly additive? 

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2023-06-01T16:54:54.548Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you see the downvote button on the hoverover?

Replies from: mruwnik

↑ comment by mruwnik · 2023-06-01T17:35:01.482Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Right - now I see it. I was testing it on the reactions of @Sune [LW · GW]'s comment, so it was hidden far away to the right.

All in all, nice feature though.

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2023-06-01T17:38:07.739Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh, lol that'd do it.

Hmm, some of these reacts seem kind of passive-aggressive to me, the "Not planning to respond" and "I already addressed this" in particular just close off conversational doors in a fairly rude way. How do you respond to someone saying "I already addressed this" to a long paragraph of yours in such a low-effort way? It's like texting "ok" to a long detailed message.

I like the "picking one's nose" icon. :D 

Idea: to address this issue of reacts potentially leading to less texty responses [LW(p) · GW(p)] in an unconfounded way, maybe for a period of time during later experiments you could randomly enable reacts on half of all new posts?

Might be silly though. At least it's not very worthwhile without a measure of how well it goes. Potentially total amount of text written in discussions could function as such a measure, but it seems kind of crude.

I'm trying to come up with a new icon for "not a crux" and also introduce a corresponding "is a crux" icon.

A crux is something upon which your beliefs hinge and would go one way or another. So how about?

 

Do any of these seem like a good icon? Out of them, which do you most prefer?

Or I could go outright for a hinge:

A reaction I'd sometimes find helpful (example [LW(p) · GW(p)]), that doesn't seem quite covered by any of the existing, is "unclear why you're saying this". Like, I think I know what you're saying and perhaps I agree with it, but are you saying it because you expect me to disagree, or to elaborate on something I said, or just riffing, or...?

But I don't know what label or icon I'd use for this, and "off topic or tangential" isn't a terrible fit, at least some of the time.

Idiosyncratic request... I use a custom dark mode plugin, and using this plugin the react symbols become black-on-dark-grey which is very difficult to see. If they counted as 'text' then my plugin would convert them to white text, like it does normal text. If they were non-transparent images, then they'd have a white background and black text... (less preferable, but better than black-on-dark-grey). Could the symbols be made to 'count' as text somehow? Would that also be better for accessibility (screen readers)?

I don't see something for "rests on a faulty premise".  There are "obtuse", "locally invalid", and "disagree", but none of these feel right. Possibly line-level reacts will fix this, since you can highlight the faulty premise.

Likely too complex and unwieldy to be implemented in practice or make sense as a react system, but I thought I would mention it just in case:

Some of the reacts, such as "I already addressed this", could possibly benefit from some sort of "pointing" functionality, selecting the part(s) of the discussion where one addressed it. Similarly, "Please elaborate" could possibly benefit from selecting the part(s) that one wants elaborated.

For what it's worth: when selecting a voting system for my post, it looks like if I pick name-attached reactions, I won't get the two-axis voting, which I assume isn't correct?

The way to undo an inline react seems to be downvoting your own reaction twice. It really seems like I'm missing something obvious, because I currently have to zoom in or out to get the text to reflow just right so I can mouseover from the text to the react box without it disappearing en route. Is there a better way?

I'm not sure about the laugh react, since it can be easily abused in cases of strong disagreement.

More generally: low-quality replies can be downvoted, but as I understand, low-quality reactions are given equal weight and visibility. Limiting the available vectors of toxicity may be more generally desirable than increasing the available vectors of light-heartedness.