I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
My friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to happen anyway.
I usually shorten it to simply "I concur", if no comment follows, it is a given. Maybe if you are using a lossy message format where a potential comment might get left out it would be necessary to make that part clear, but for most things it is a given.
Well that's what the reactions are for, right? Because then we have this sort of division between acks (and other reactions really) vs "actual messages". Combine that with specific emojis in certain social/professional circles and you've got yourself an extra layer of nuance in an otherwise tricky-to-navigate space!
Well 'ack' is even shorter, and the common form of 'ACKNOWLEDGED' for such use. I've seen & used both ack & wilco in a technical/software chat context.
I use this, though I find that many folks, including many technical folks, interpret it as an exclamation of distaste (as in, "agh! ach! ack!"), so it may pay to be judicious.
Oh interesting, I have come across that, but only one person (both uses it like that and misinterpreted it when we worked with people that ack'd, which of course I saw coming & could explain since I was accustomed to his use) - didn't realise that was common too. (I would use agh/argh/ugh for that personally, depending on precise feeling(!))
Why do you need to respond at all? The phone tells you that the message has been delivered, and if you didn't ask a question or otherwise request a response why would there be any obligation to do so?
A delivery receipt, an automatic read receipt, and a human ack are quite distinct. The first means the device will offer it to a user who eventually looks. The second means the device expects that the user saw it. The third means the user definitely saw and understood it.
It's rarely obligatory (unless the sender literally requests an ack) but is more to offer a data point just in case it happens to be useful. In some cases it will definitely be useful, like to unblock something that can't proceed until the sender knows you've been briefed. For example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later than 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually staying out late is blocked by my ack. Of course, this could just be turned into a yes/no question awaiting my answer, but that would be silly considering that I only say yes; they're not soliciting a decision from me, just acknowledgement.
> For example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later than 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually staying out late is blocked by my ack.
Do you have an integration test for that in CI? That protocol sounds like the kind of thing which can break easily.
If I as a kid would hear that instruction "can stay out later than 10pm any night if parent knows about it" I would assume notification is necessary, but I would not return home early just because my parent did not ack it. And if my parents complained about that I would find them unreasonable.
Of course with your kids you might have been much more explicit about what you expect from them. Or who knows, maybe you are much more predictable in your response times than my parents were, so your kids might worry about you and call you if you don't respond anything.
I was just trying to come up with a scenario involving an obligatory ack (but not one in response to someone literally requesting a response every time), as a way of showing that while an ack is not typically obligatory, theoretically there could be a counter examples in the form of the ack-seeker twiddling their thumbs until ack, so to speak. I think you're right that these hypothetical kids would find it infuriating, and such protocol would work better if every ack-seeking message actually had a question ("11pm, ok?") making it explicit. It's just weird to pose a question if the answer is the same 100% of the time, and the only variable is timely receipt. How about this: "11pm, lmk" -- but the suffix is wasted keystrokes whatever it is.
I don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like that outside onto the public internet is absurd.
I replied thrice because I was surprised to read commenters replies as if Outlook introduced a new unheard-of feature. Including an interop related question I thought about later, because I still can’t understand why emojis involve loading images.
I found the thread too late to develop a well researched post and so commented as I read. Sorry if it offends your sensibilities. But why are you policing how I comment? :-)
Also, why Gmail is important: It’s a fairly major email provider so it sort of matters when they deployed this. Two market majors having a feature usually implies others will follow suit — eventually.
> is it supposed to be okay
This assumes so much. I’ll turn this around. Why’s it not okay? I can’t see any RFC that forbids this. It’s not a feature I’m interested in but I think it’s interesting that email is evolving to match what users are used to on Slack, Teams, WhatsApp etc. And (software) evolution is something I’m very interested in.
Honestly if someone were to send me a message that only required a simple acknowledgement, and that person hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged. But I suspect what you’re really wanting is typed acknowledgment?
I would probably just send the emote I would react with as a single-letter answer. If I have nothing to say beyond "thumbs up emoji" the fact that you don't like reactions doesn't, by virtue of your opinion, give me anything more interesting to say in return.
Most of the time I would be fine with the plain old read receipt + no other mail stating protest. The reactions have too different set between clients to convey enough meaning for me.
I don't want my messages acknowledged, it's just The Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know, otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say Thanks, you're paying me to do it
Although it seems the military metaphor of Two Generals' Problem which I assume you're referencing is incidental, it's ironic that in the actual military all communication from superior to subordinate must be acknowledged perfunctorily, at least in very disciplined services like the United States Marine Corps.
For example, if a sergeant says to a private "It's a nice day outside.", the private is obliged to respond, even if the statement is rhetorical. This leads to perfunctory responses, in this case it would be "Aye aye sergeant", or "Aye sergeant", or more casually "Er" or "Kill". You're not obliged to agree, just to acknowledge. Pretty similar to tapback responses in messenger apps and emails.
If this is a thing (never saw it in 20 years of active and reserve Navy service), it must be limited not just to the Marine Corps, but the ground side of the Corps, not the air side.
Sure, there's norms around how you talk on the radio, standing watch on the bridge, on chat channels for command and control, etc. But the rest of the time, the rest of the military talks to each other more or less like normal people with the addition of acknowledging relative rank.
Well there you go, I was ground side Marine Corps for four years. No comment from a superior can pass unacknowledged. Indeed we view the air wing as a place where standards are lax and you live an easier life.
> I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know
You’ve replaced “read” in the first part with “agree” in the second, and those are not at all the same thing. I can’t let you know that I haven’t read your message.
If a parent says to the other “hey, I’m running late, I need you to pick up Tiny Tim from school”, an acknowledgement is paramount even if you read, understood, and agreed to the message.
> it's just The Generals Problem.
That problem is concerned with an unreliable communication channel, which does not apply to the situation.
This question is how we get opinionated software that slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it" should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a feature.
When the medium is email, I’m not expecting a reaction as it’s async communication method and if they want to react it’s in a form of another email reply. Occasionally I need a confirmation or something and I ask for it in the email, if they just gave me a thumbs up it becomes uncertain if it’s a confirmation because I’ve learned that some people thumbs up everything just to acknowledge it and I later find out they just want to signal they’re online and on top of things but actually never read my message
Ironically, since HN tends to dislike short content-less posts, which means quite often unless we have something more to say, we do not respond at all.
A lot of email communication happens by this same rule.
Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people that need to ack a message can just send one, and the client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not bothering anyone.
But, of course, every client needs to know about that for it to work.
I know of a few company cultures like this. You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected. Everything else is just noise, and employees tend to keep the noise level quite low.
> You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected.
Unfortunately, I work with humans and technology, both of whom are fallible. As such, reminders and prompts are occasionally required. Being able to tell if a message was received, read, and understood is a very useful signal.
I genuinely think that in this situation, you should do NOTHING instead of reaction. If the explicit ok is not needed, like on HN, then thumps up are not needed either.
It's a contrived situation but does represent a more general set of conversations where the need for response may be more ambiguous. There's a space where acknowledgements and reactions are useful without breaking the flow of conversation.
Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the space. Which brings us back to, "Why?"
Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.
They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their text representation. It's can be misleading because the text representation sometimes diverge from what the user thinks the emoji means.
This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji like most other people.
The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter, because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My proposal here would do just this, but require the sender to do nothing different than before.
Yeah, that's kinda the idea. But I'm worried about preserving messaging integrity: if you just let that person set an option to never see reactions at all, then his coworkers will be sending reactions which he won't see, which will probably lead to conflicts ("why didn't you acknowledge that you saw my message?" "I did! I sent a thumbs-up!" "I've disabled reactions, so you need to type out these acknowledgements to me." "Fuck that!" -> HR has to get involved)
Basically, the anti-reactions people are going to be angry no matter what, because the rest of the world isn't doing messaging the way they want.
Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction.
Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
Some people pay per text message received. So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication" well then I'm sorry, but their preference is my cost, so I don't think it's out of line to politely ask them not to.
Ultimately, this is something that I'd rather be handled at the carrier layer: I should be able to have my phone reject a text message and not pay for / receive it.
On the topic of configurability: Software should ultimately serve the end user. When a developer makes an undesirable (to a user) change to the software and provides the user no way to opt out of that change, it's serving the developer's interests, and it's doing a slightly worse job at serving the user.
> So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication
No, it doesn't, because that's engaging in bilateral negotiation of how the communication will go with the others involved in it. Unilaterally disabling the feature, however, is different, and that is what I was criticizing.
AFAIK it resulted in huge bill for the receiver, though I have no idea if certain services weren't billed differently (wouldn't surprise me if you could send text messages that were billed only on sender side, for extra)
> by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have
I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently.
If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on.
> it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something
For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
Well, nobody I know would respond to such a question with a reaction (an emoji, yes, a reaction, no), so this is not an issue in my crowd. I suppose (and it's obvious now that I think about it) this depends on what the social norms are in your group.
> By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things differently for you.
To a trivial degree, sure. Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
Social interaction always involves compromise and reasonable accommodations for others. In this sense, I ask people to do things differently for me every day, and they usually do. And others ask me to do things differently every day, and I usually do. It's part of the social negotiations that make societies work.
I do feel the need to reiterate that I am not opposed to reactions generally. Only in email.
> Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
It's ok either way. But it was you who claimed you don't request changes. We live in a society and all that. We can collaborate and agree on the way we communicate in groups.
For christ sake, if there is explicit question do not react with reaction only, but use words.
Because, recipient does not know whether you are acknowledging that you read that question or answering it or what. Emoji reactions are ambiguous majority of the time. Which is fine when they are used to add emotions to the discussion, but not fine when you are actually communicating with it.
I don't like it in Slack as it gives another avenue for out of sequence communication.
When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.
In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.
This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?
When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.
Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.
In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.
Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.
Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.
Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in.
Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.