Rating System (was: what even are social noises round N+1)

Unfortunately, it's forum-specific.

 

I could get by without funny for sure, and I'm not at all attached to winner or useful. I'm still sticking to wanting just a single sympathy response, whatever that is, because I would like to cover a wide stretch of emotional ground, for one flavor of accessibility, but it would be amazing if we could minimize the total number of responses, for a competing flavor of accessibility :P I like witnessed, because it has more personality than sympathy noises, but having a witnessed button and a sympathy button would be very frustrating to me.

I'm also really not a fan of the <3 response, because like hugs, it cccccouuuuld mean a number of varying levels of intimacy, and I'm okay with some of them. But I'm very not okay with others. I'll use that emoticon sometimes for close friends or when a friend says something super clever, but outside of a few people I mostly reserve it for like, romantic contexts.

I'd even kind of prefer replacing the reactions with like, [sympathy noises], [agreement noises], etc, except I'm still pretty sure we'd have people loudly disagreeing over which reactions we need to include.

And an extra flavor of not-doing-harm: If there's a 'seen' reaction added, I think the actual word should be something like 'acknowledged'. If like, someone goes through a person's ITA thread, and marks all the old posts SEEN, SEEN, SEEN, that can send a nasty message pretty easily, whether it's intentional or not. 'Acknowledged' is harder to weaponize or take badly.

 

Whups, I put this in the middle of my longish post, so I'm just going to restate: I think <3 alarms me even more than hugs do. The sentiment of hugs is one thing, but a heart is another. I get some people wanting to convey that kind of emotion, and there are some specific people and/or contexts on here where I would accept it. But in general, it's going to hit me in an upsettingly intimate place, and my main reaction to getting a <3 is going to be back off give me space why won't you leave me alone stop touching me

 

Okay, so, i think one of the things that's becoming clear here is there's a whole lot of messages that are gonna be really hard to express in this system without significant problems.

And I want to be clear that the goal here is not perfect coverage, but to try to make things better.

Definitely keeping: Like, Witnessed.
Definitely adding: Sympathy.
Definitely dropping: Hugs (and variants).

I think Hugs is gonna have to go, because it and things like it are all gonna hit boundary issues in hard-to-predict-or-control ways. And I want to make it clear, I'm not saying the people who like it are wrong, I'm saying I don't think the thing can be there without doing significant harm over time.

I think Informative and Useful will probably get dropped. They add some information, but the information they add isn't all that necessary, and it's not as likely to be an emotional problem for people not to get the tags with it, I think? And I'm trying to reduce the number of things.

I am not as sure about Funny, it's okay but it's not great and I'm not sure it'd be better with rewording.

 

Here's the basic problem: Unwanted affection is often Very Bad, and determining that boundary is pretty hard. There's also no way to block/filter the thing trivially.

 

[affection noises]

But in general, that's a flavor of reaction where... I understand why people would want it and how they would use it. But in a forum where I'm close to a few people, acquainted with more, and effective strangers with plenty, I wouldn't feel at all comfortable expressing that to anyone I wasn't close to, and I'm particularly uncomfortable leaving it open for people to express to me with just the click of a button. I wouldn't push affection at anyone I wasn't close to, and I'd be super unhappy receiving it from anyone except those same people, just out of the blue, out of nowhere, without so much as a how-do-you-do.

My... hmm hm hm. My personal space is pretty important to me. In a physical sense, but in an emotional one too, which is where I'm running out of words to articulate it. But some of that is probably why I prefer 'witnessed' to other expressions of sympathy, because it doesn't automatically drag the other person in close to me. And the internet being what it is, I can't exactly stop someone from rubbing their digital hands all over my face, if that's what they want to do. But I really dislike giving someone such an easy one-click avenue to push on me how CLOSE we are when I don't necessarily want to be that close, but I never got asked and I can't refuse. Affection is an important emotion, but if someone wants to push it at me, they can convey it through their other reactions, or they can use their words to properly articulate it. It's something personal enough that I don't feel obliged to give other people a direct avenue in to touch me. Emotionally.

God, what are words, none of this makes sense :P

 

Attempt at a shorter version: I don't want to feel obligated to receive other people's affection. Or even to field it. Taking the weight of other people's emotions is exhausting. I have no control over who does the thing or when they do it, and I can't say 'please don't' or even properly say 'please stop' unless I derail an entire conversation to respond to this reaction that sits outside the conversation proper, and that's only going to (maybe) solve the problem that one time. I can't stop people from shoving their emotions on me if they're determined to do the thing, but I hate letting them have a one-button shortcut. Saying it would smother me is overstating things. But I'd rather not have a button sitting there saying 'would you like to smother spock y/n?' The other reactions are responses that exist without much inherent emotional weight. This isn't.

 

We could just shorten it to "Fist". There is no possible way anyone would misunderstand or be upset by a "Fist" reaction!

(Note, your idea is much better than mine.)