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Question from a nub.

I like how in discord there are "reaction buttons" when you have no time to type a response you can still show it by a (thumbs-up) icon.
How difficult, reasonable, it would be to have something akin to that on Dakka?

A button on each post, when clicked would leave a (thumbs-up) or (fire) icon?

Honestly I'm not a fan of them at all.

They tend to change how a social population behaves online. People get more quippy to get the "nice joke have a like" attitude and it can actually reduce engagement because people stop spending 5 seconds to type a response and instead just hit a like or emote button.

Social media loves it because it works great at getting loads of "hits"; but at the same time it also dramatically reduces actual social interaction.

Any emotes with a negative connection also cause endless drama and headaches (which is why a lot of forum software doesn't use negative ones or its a rarely enabled option - though Reddit loves them).


Again to my eye they are a social media tool not an actual community interaction and building tool.

Fair point.

If all you want to do is throw a thumbs-up at someone, just click the Exalt button.

A forum like Dakka is more about actual discussion than, to be crude a moment, being in a circle-jerk.

"circle-jerk" is a crude misrepresentation of what I wanted, but What does exalt do?
And how do I know if my post was exalted?

And my question was not about interaction ethics of the platform, but how difficult/reasonable would be to add something like that.

Exalting posts/threads gives them more visibility in the top rated topics thread view, and there is no way to tell if a post has been exalted or by whom (unless they say).

I guess a thumbs up, +1 would not be hard to implement but it is not wanted by the admins as it discourages actual interaction. Same reason why +1 style posts are classed as spam here and can entail mod intervention.

Ah, ok that is good to know.
And that makes sense, thank you.

The thread view counter should then serve as a visual indicator, it is also interaction.