(If I want to express stronger gratitude than that, I'd rather write it out.)

Nod.

Usually the situation is that it's adding value, but also reducing a (different form of) value. (And in some cases I think it's locally adding more value than it's destroying, but I expect it to divert the thread in a direction that is longterm net negative)

If I'm deciding whether to post a comment, and my worry is an impact on my long term karma versus how many little dopamine hits I'll get from reactions, that feels like exactly the types of questions I want to avoid in my life. If either of these things is driving my decision, rather than what would help build knowledge or be useful to myself and others, then I'd consider it time to pack it in and stop posting entirely.

My experience in other circles with Slack and Discord is that the niche of emoji reactions is primarily non-interrupting room-sensing (there are also sillier uses in casual social contexts, but they don't seem relevant here). I don't feel any pressure to specifically have read something, and I haven't observed people reading anything into failure to provide a reaction. The rare exception to the latter is when there's clearly an active conversation going on that someone's already clearly been active in, which can be handled by explicitly signaling departure, which was a norm in those circumstances anyway.

Non-interrupting room-sensing in a fast-flowing channel environment has generally struck me as beneficial. Being able to quickly find the topic-flow of the current conversation is important, and reactions do not have to be scanned for topic introductions. Reactions encode leafness: you can't reply to a reaction easily, which also means giving a reaction cannot induce social pressure to reply to it. They encode weaker ties to the individual: people with the same reaction are stacked together, and it takes an extra effort to look at the list of reacting users. Differentially, reactions can also signal level of involvement: someone “conversing” in only reactions may not be up for thinking about the conversation hard enough to produce text responses, but is able to listen and give base emotional feedback (which seems to be the most relevant to the proposed uses here). It serves a similar function to scanning people's facial expressions in a physical meeting room.

I'm very unclear on how these patterns would play out in a longer-form, more delay-tolerant environment like a comment tree. Some of the room-sensing interpretation makes less sense the less the timescale of the reactions corresponds to unconscious-emotion synchronization; there's a lot of lost flow context.

My experience from seeing emoticons used on Slack/Discord is that they help combat the muted signal problem of online communication, and thus actually reduce the toxicity of discussion.

People want to feel respected, loved, appreciated, etc. When we interact physically, you can easily experience subtle forms of these feelings. For instance, even if you just hang out in the same physical space with a bunch of other people and don’t really interact with them, you often get some positive feelings regardless. Just the fact that other people are comfortable having you around, is a subtle signal that you belong and are accepted.

Similarly, if you’re physically in the same space with someone, there are a lot of subtle nonverbal things that people can do to signal interest and respect. Meeting each other’s gaze, nodding or making small encouraging noises when somebody is talking, generally giving people your attention. This kind of thing tends to happen automatically when we are in each other’s physical presence.

Online, most of these messages are gone: a thousand people might read your message, but if nobody reacts to it, then you don’t get any signal indicating that you were seen. Even getting a hundred likes and a bunch of comments on a status, can feel more abstract and less emotionally salient than just a single person nodding at you and giving you an approving look when you’re talking.

My hypothesis is that the lack of such subtle "body language" signals is often the cause of toxicity, because generic likes feel more abstract and then people ramp up their outrage in order to elicit reactions and feel like they have been noticed. Whereas, in my own experience at least, the kind of somewhat personalized (in the sense of having been selected from a vast set) reacts on Slack/Discord do have some of the "body language felt sense" that makes me feel genuinely noticed in a way that a mere upvote doesn't. (And the point of the signals being subtle is that they're not major enough that you would normally bother expressing them in a comment.)

Reading a message takes more cognitive resources then seeing a single emoticon. It's easy for people to click +1 to get an opinion of what multiple people think then when every person lays out "I agree with you", "I think we should adopt your proposal" etc.

Team slack is the domain that most clearly motivated me to consider reacts for LW. They also especially made me long for them in google docs.

Emoticons etc still take up a full line of text, and easily get mixed in with other discussions that are happening. Reacts allow for much higher information density, which allows the overall conversation to be more complex.

Other than both being pictographic, I'm not sure emoticons and reactions are that related. Emoticons are either objects (neither here nor there for our purposes) or facial/bodily expressions. Reactions are emotional or high-level responses to information.

You can't really express the thumbs-up reaction with a facial expression emoticon. You can use a smiley face or something similar, but thumbs-up means approval, not happiness. If someone says "I'll be five minutes late - start without me" I don't want to express happiness at this, but I do want to acknowledge it and (if this is the case) say it's OK. A thumbs-up does this wonderfully: by definition, it means I have acknowledged the message, and it signals approval rather than disapproval, but nothing else. You can't really do that with emoticons.

I think there are lots of situations in which reactions can do things emoticons can't, and I've found that I notice nice opportunities for reactions more when I'm in an environment in which they're readily available.

It's about on par with other sites. Conversational threading has never worked well on websites, AFAIK. trn did fairly well on Usenet, there have been some e-mail clients (none currently, AFAIK) that do a fairly good job. LW (and other reddit-like sites) does well for topics with comment trees that are bushy for the first level or two, and narrow below that.

The killer feature that nobody's been able to replicate is zoom/filter to one unread path down the reply tree, and then to advance to the next branch which contains an unread reply from a followed ancestor. Basically depth-first reading of new comments (with an option to go up to ancestors for context). All web comment systems I know of show breadth-first, including both read and unread comments (or with context loss when switching between all and unread).

I presume nobody's been able to replicate it because the idea of a conversational tree AS A NAVIGATION TREE is too complicated and techie for the vast majority of modern participants. It might actually work on LW, but it's different enough that there's not much reusable stuff out there and it'd be a lot of work.

I intuitively believe that anonymous reactions will be more likely to lead to gaming, becoming a way to snipe or brigade from the sidelines in a more emotionally impactful way than downvotes and upvotes. Being able to weight the reactions by status is important.

There is also less pushback possible versus toxic anonymous uses of emoji-like reactions, because they often encode emotions less abstractly than votes do, and norms like “you should vote based on certain criteria that promote the purpose of the space” don't translate well to “you should emote based on certain criteria” (even though the latter does happen in human societies).

A place where I see private information as potentially beneficial, in a way that isn't reflected in any previous reaction systems I've seen, is actually “reacting user reveals reaction only to comment owner”. This would be to a PM response as a visible reaction would be to a comment response, and would serve a similar function when someone doesn't feel comfortable revealing a potentially low-status emotional reaction to the group nor being clear enough about it to raise the interaction stakes, but where such information especially in aggregate could still be useful. If a lot of people have a good or bad feeling about something, but few of them feel comfortable showing it in public, that can be very useful dynamics information.

(My previous comment's caveats about how I'm not sure how well any of this works in a comment-tree situation apply.)

Hmm. Don't know the common use cases but once I'm having a conversation in a thread, I usually only upvote things if they seem particularly good or bad, or particularly standalone. (in particular when there's a high volume of comments in the thread)

One note is that since then we wrote this post:

Site Guide: Personal Blogposts vs Frontpage Posts [LW · GW]

And we've also added some features the help clarify things a bit – personal blogposts now have a little "person" icon when you're looking at lists of posts (such as the home page, or all posts). It also appears directly on the post itself (similar to how GreaterWrong does it).

In several places there are now tooltips that explain what sorts of things are good fits for personal blogpost and what is good for frontpage.

I'm not sure I've properly understood the complaint, but I think the recently posted Frontpage/Personal site guide [LW · GW] post sheds light on what kind of content is welcome on LessWrong and where it goes.

Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong [1]. I (and others on the team) feel it is important that members are able to “bring their entire selves” to LessWrong and are able to share all their thoughts, ideas, and experiences without fearing whether they are “on topic” for LessWrong. Rationality is not restricted to only specific domains of one’s life and neither should LessWrong be.

However, to maintain its overall focus while still allowing posts on any topic, LessWrong classifies posts as either Personal blogposts or as Frontpage posts.

If you go to the AllPosts page and apply no filter, you will see personal blogposts too on which there are few restrictions of topic.

I don't think I would quite embrace a distinction of "really part of LW" vs "not really part of LW", though I do expect the Frontpage vs Personal Blogpost distinction will map to a fair extent onto "is material representative of what people associate with LW" vs "material on lots of random topics."

As with that recent post, we're working to make it clear what material is welcome on LessWrong, where it can be seen, and how people can use the site to see what they want to see.