We actually switched out the heart-like reaction to thumb’s-up-agree before we learned about Retort. Since we now have the ability to have other count-reactions and a set, should we consider bringing back a more general acknowledge/like/love main reaction and make thumb’s-up-agree be one of the Retort reactions?
Better do this ASAP if we want to, it will be weird to switch people’s reactions! We don’t want to change the meaning of reactions again…
Besides seeing pros and cons either way for the two options for the “main” reaction, a primary reason to switch back to heart-like is that many aspects of the Discourse setup assume that meaning e.g. badges and primary stats etc.
If we switched the symbol back to heart, we could still name it “respect” instead of “like”…
My point is: “repsect” and “like” are different concepts, so their labels can’t be switched arbitrarily either. It is the same as replacing “like” with “agree”.
I did an initial pass and changed all the strings from “Agree” to “Respect”, as well as reverting the emoji from to .
I still need to polish up the strings, as some of them are currently quite awkward, implying a lack of respect if people haven’t hit the button. The solution for most of these is to use “show respect” instead, since failing to express respect is not negative in the same way.
Well, we need to revert. On IRC, after @iko expressed some differing interpretations of “respect” used this way, @Salt was able to weigh in and make a final decision: we stick to thumbs-up/agree as default.
For reference, I first came upon “respect” via papers like ‘Respect’ button is better for democracy than ‘like’ button which emphasized how respect encouraged better reactions to things you disagree with… but they didn’t study “agree”, and anyway, decision is done.
We can keep heart probably in the Retort list if we want…
I don’t want to belabor this, but after finding additional text to tweak for “agreement” and looking over badges, there’s a lot of things we probably should turn off to make this work.
Discourse programmed all these things to honor and encourage people to mark “likes” a lot, and we don’t really want to deeply honor people just for getting agreement. It’s great if people post helpful, respectful, but unpopular opinions.
My view now is that we ought to just turn off badges that do all this emphasis on getting and giving agreement.
Although I could see putting as the primary and calling it “like” because it would go better with the way Discourse is designed, there’s something good about having that as one of the Retort reactions, since it’s the Retort button.
What if the primary reaction were simply as “Stars”?
It’s a vaguely positive word without any other real meanings to cause confusion. I think it implies quality more than agreement. It works fine with the badge system.
I’m not seeing any real downsides yet. Can anyone think of some?
GNU Social uses stars as their single reaction, and I’ve always found it far less frustrating than thumb’s-up, heart, or up-vote. But they call it “favorite” which is a common understanding of stars but not really what we want.
We need a real-time meeting with @Salt ASAP to resolve this (the whole reaction topic, not just what’s primary) and then go forward.
But from my view, I’m inclined toward with some wording like “appreciate” for primary and moving “agree” back to Retort. The primary reasoning is that we don’t want to push people to mark “agree”, we want that to be used only when really appropriate. It also fits far better than agree for all the assumptions and badges etc. in overall design of Discourse.
All that said, the ideal would be to not have any “primary” reaction, just a set of all-equal ones, but I don’t think that’s an option.
We ended up going with calling it “appreciate”. We can’t really change this in any meaningful way going forward as it would change the meaning of existing reactions. At most, we could tweak the look of the icon or something. So this is set now overall.
to 
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as the primary and calling it “like” because it would go better with the way Discourse is designed, there’s something good about having that as 
as “Stars”?