Comment on How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks agoOne concern is whether this would be too complicated for people to understand or engage with properly.
Grandmas nowadays already spam emoji conversations happily. I wouldn’t be any worried that this system looks “complicated”. Did we forget that we were once children who loved to tinker with things, be they the concrete such as the bathroom lock or the abstract such as mom’s rules on if we can keep a pet?
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
Interesting that you say that, because I was imagining that each type of vote could be represented by a different emoji. I think people would get it if we picked the right ones. But care would be needed to avoid those that could have multiple meanings.
Maybe something like this:
Agree - 👍 Disagree - 👎 Friendly/kind (not sure the best word) - 🫂 Hostile/rude - 🤬 Factual or insightful -💡 Incorrect - ❌
You could add others but those seem like the most common and useful signals I would want to send while voting.
Another idea would be to just open it up and let people use any emoji to react. Some platforms already do this but it can get more confusing in terms of how to interpret and incorporate all of that information into ranking algorithms.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
Please no! XD We already have enough emoji as it is, not to mention they are comboable in non-portable ways or they change meaning according to the provider / renderer (GUN becoming WATER GUN is a good example).
But I do think there are valid “reaction sets” that could be interpreted with emoji, and pretty much all of them happen to match the examples you have provided:
Ofc I prefer the reactions are biased towards promoting good interaction; I really don’t see much use for reactions like “hostile / rude”, “faggot”, “kys” or stuff like that. Downvote and, depending on the case, Factually Incorrect and Unfun deal with most of that.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
The reason I included them is to help distinguish between unpopular but constructive content, which I believe is very valuable in disrupting the echo-chamber effect, and content that is actually just bad, rude, insulting etc. and not contributing to anything.
Often, when there are guidelines on how to vote in platforms or communities they instruct people not to downvote for mere disagreement but people do it anyway. So by separating the disagree downvote from the “this is just objectively bad” vote, I think this can help curate a more positive environment. The goal is that if a comment or post is getting more than a few of those reactions, it should be hidden or maybe even flagged for moderation. But posts that are merely unpopular can stay as long as they are factual and polite.