I agree we don’t want every possible useful one. That’s why it’s a brainstorm list. I think we should consider the trade-offs between clutter and value of each to get a limited set.
Update: I somewhat re-ordered to a vague priority order, although it was hard, it’s rough
Alright. Let’s try to cut down the list a little, then. Here’s some I think can go:
These seem to share a common sentiment of something like, “this is an exemplary post, and others should strive to write posts like it”. I see a lot of value in being able to express that, and I see a lot of potential for misuse, where it just becomes a second like button.
Let’s keep brainstorming for a phrasing that can’t be interpreted as a second like, but if we can’t find one, I’d like to avoid this for the initial launch.
I can also see other ways to honor posts like these, like a tag, or a badge for a certain number of “changed my mind” reactions (if we can automate it).
Leaving any reaction serves the same purpose; this one is only useful if I want to react but none of the others fit. Let’s just make sure we have a wide enough range that something will always fit.
In particular, “Respect” and “Appreciate” together cover a large portion of “Acknowledge” cases.
I’d like to use the heart for “Appreciate”. I think that gives it enough of the flavor of “love” that we lose little by omitting it.
There’s some value in being able to tell someone their post is confusing without leaving a reply, but I can also imagine feeling frustrated because I don’t know which part of my post was confusing. I’m also wary of this becoming a downvote button, although, in fairness, this would be a much better outcome than something like “condolences” becoming misused as one since no true downvote button exists.
This one has some overlap with ‘Appreciate’ as a way of showing gratitude. However, it’s got a totally different vibe (“whoo-hoo!!”) that I don’t want to lose. So, I’d be okay with dropping this iff there’s another emoji that captures that same emotion.
In the current list, there isn’t one. But maybe we could do it the other way and give the icon of this one enough of a spin that it can serve the same purpose as another one (maybe “clever / funny / entertaining”?).
So, that would leave us with:
That seems like a pretty decent starting set to me.
In this case, the needs more research/details/facts etc clearly is similar to citation needed but they are really not the same. At best, “needs citation” could be considered a subset of what I’m talking about.
Citation needed example:
For all the forums where people have the ability to “disagree” without it being just a vague “downvote”, most people find it helpful.
Example of “needs more research/details…”:
How about a “disagree” button?
Okay, I understand the difference. This is basically about unresolved questions in a post. I think this might be another that’s better as a tag.
If we could tag individual replies, then I think that would work well enough, but given only tagging full topics, there remains value in reacting to a post saying it needs more substance etc.
I went through the emoji and tried to pick out those that would work well. I picked out one that I like the best and also included a bunch of alternatives. We can also use custom emoji if we decide something is lacking.
@wolftune or @Salt, I erred towards including all possible alternatives so you don’t need to look through the whole list. Feel free to just edit them out of this post if you want to veto them.
Primary reaction:
— respect — 
Retort reactions:
— support / agree / like / “me too” / ¿well said? — 
— thank you / thanks — 
— excited / w00t / cheers — 
— tl;dr — 
— this-changed-my-mind — 
— sympathies — 
— skeptical: citation/research needed — 
— funny — 
I am really on the fence between and for “This changed my mind”.
(which I think of as, “This blew my mind”) is definitely more lighthearted / carries less gravitas, but I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.
Note: we edited the reply above to be the proposals (leaving some extra notes about alternatives).
The lightbulb / mind-blown images were nice but rejected in the end for the graduation cap (if you’re not having your mind changed, you’re not learning and graduating in your understanding…)
I added the reactions. For now I just used the built-in ones instead of changing the names (by making them custom emoji). Some observations:
This is the box that pops up to choose a reaction.
First, the obvious bug: the line should not clip into the hover.
Second, we cannot control the order they appear in. They’re ordered chronological by when they were added (and possibly also by number of reactions, but I can’t test that alone).
Finally, I don’t see a place in the admin settings to change the “{{user}} reacted with {{reaction}}” text. I’m not sure if that’s a problem, but it does affect the phrasing we want to use.
My reactions to this so far:
I also think it might be, especially since we one can do respect + excitement.
However, the 3+3+1 layout for 7 reactions looks really bad, so if we remove “thank you”, I want to add (or remove) another.
I like 8 total and don’t prefer to lose another besides “thanks”. So, I think we either swap “thanks” for “confused” (or another suggestion if you or others have one), or we keep “thanks” for now but at least switch it to a hand-clap icon.
@smichel17 I opened https://git.snowdrift.coop/sd/outreach/issues/7 for the tasks, want to claim that?
It’s hard-coded in the discourse plugin, so it’s not possible to change it via the discourse interface. There’s an issue about that here.
If we want to change it, we can modify the hard-coded string in the cloned retort repo (requires backend access, but we’re only doing it once); not ideal, but possible.
We’re moving agree back to primary. So, that is gone from Retort. We can thus keep Retort at 6 or put the heart back there for some purpose…
Okay, I suggest we stick to 8 Retort emojis in this order:
— like
— Thanks!
\o/ — Yay!
— funny
— this-changed-my-mind
— tl;dr
— skeptical: needs more explanation/research/citations
— sympathies
Note that this means one row of various positive-acknowledgement and one row of more troublesome, nuanced reactions!
I thought about and “love” as alternate for the first one or other uses for . I think that could work, but I dislike the combination of and “like” and see more value in having a mild positive acknowledgement than having a “love” reaction. The super value to is that it’s the same icon as Retort button, so people can be prompted to click the Retort button when they want to get that reaction instead of the agree-reaction.
I hope we can really encourage people to mark that as appropriate. We don’t want cases such as where I got an “agree” on my personal intro post… that’s weird.
All that said, I could see — love as well or instead of the Thanks or Yay! reactions. There’s cases where love is appropriate…
One other useful-enough thing to possibly consider: 
… of course, people can post actual posts with emoji like and and tons more. The point of reactions is to avoid extra posts for the most common reactions and to prompt valuable reactions people might not mark as much otherwise. But if we want to explore having more than 8 reactions in Retort, I’m open to considering it.
Update: 9 reactions is 3x3 and looks fine. 10 is 5x2, and also looks fine enough. 11 is no good, of course. 12 is 4x3 and works but is the absolute limit to consider ever (really too much, overloading feeling).
I made a \o/ emoji, mostly for fun but we could use it if we want.
Here it is at emoji size:
Here’s the gimp source file. Discourse wouldn’t let me upload it as a .xcf*, so just remove the txt extension after you download: whoooo.xcf.txt (32.9 KB).
*I fixed this after in the admin panel but I can’t actually fix it for this specific file.
nice first version, but I don’t find the expression correct. The smile and eyes and relative size of the face doesn’t capture the same feeling as \o/ does. Here’s a tweak:
and xcf: w00t.xcf (33.0 KB)
addendum: I think the hands ideally would be either fist or spread fingers…
One more variant (then I get back to real work):
w00t2.xcf (26.5 KB)
