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

Well I mean, I said I was frustrated by how much they overlapped :P I wouldn't mind at all if both of them went, but dropping at least one would be pretty awesome.

 

Oh no, I said it messily across like four paragraphs and you said it cleanly in two lines ;u;

But yes, this is the thing I was trying to say. I don't want people to touch me in real life, and I can't stop it entirely, but I also don't walk around wearing a sign that says 'touch me if you want!' That, but with internet affection.

 

But I mean that in the direction of accessibility. Legitimately, the more reactions are added, the more I am going to be unable to use the reaction system at all. A lot of that is down to emotions and my brain freezing up trying to parse and select, but it's still accessibility. And I don't think I'm the only person in that situation. If there isn't beneficial reason to have a thing, it helps me to have it removed. It isn't ACTIVELY hurting me, but removing it still helps.

 

Competing needs is what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to argue for a return to likes only, even though that would be easiest on me. I've even been saying things about how to implement the 'seen' whatsit, even though it's going to make my life more difficult. But 'informative' and 'useful' overlap, there is minimal benefit to keeping them both and it definitely helps to have one go. Heck, even if another reaction fills in that space and the count goes back up, then that's fine! As long as it's a different reaction that covers different territory. If the reactions stay compact and streamlined, that's what helps me, and having both 'informative' and 'useful' with all that overlap is not compact or streamlined. I can see the point of having one, but I don't see people arguing that they definitely definitely need both of those things.

 

How would people feel about "Interesting" replacing both "Informative" and "Useful"?

 

Also, I want to clarify a thing: The problem here isn't that Affection Is Bad. It's that affection can have complicated boundary issues. The rating thing bypasses some of the normal forum features, and that makes it more important to give weight to "we want to reduce risk". Like, we don't worry about people posting "hugs", because that's something that you can moderate, it's something you can avoid seeing by ignoring someone, and so on. Ratings bypass that, so I'm being more restrictive. So even though I think 95+% of "hugs" reactions would be fine, and I think intentional use to hurt people would be vanishingly rare even among the cases where it's upsetting to people, it's too likely to end up triggering people, and I don't think it's a great choice.

Hmm.

Okay but a thing occurs to me:

The system does allow restricting some reactions to some forums. We might be able to make a thing with that?

 

Roger the cabin boy.