Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room.
Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
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Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#312Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room. Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Outlook. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-micr...
Good lord, IMO this has no place in a business environment
Wait till you see the state of error messages today. Not far from this joke https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#314Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is
If you can't be assed to actually write something out, then why should anybody else think your reaction worthy of their time? If it wasn't worth anything to you, then it isn't worth anything to me.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#315In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails. Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
Reactions might make sense in that context because they probably shouldn't be using email for these kinds of exchanges. Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636536
My mental model is Exchange is a really database, Outlook is a database client, and SMTP is bolted on the side. Things that make sense in the MS ecosystem map poorly onto SMTP/conventional email, but that doesn't stop them foisting it on everyone...
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the spac…
Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.
I have a strong feeling that the type of person who hates reactions is going to hate this even more, but maybe that's just me.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
Ironically, since HN tends to dislike short content-less posts, which means quite often unless we have something more to say, we do not respond at all. That is, there is no ack signal.
A lot of email communication happens by this same rule.
Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people that need to ack a message can just send one, and the client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not bothering anyone.
But, of course, every client needs to know about that for it to work.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they revert to their SMS ways occasionally.
I no longer get those messages in the default SMS app on my Pixel 8. Either google or apple updated something, they now show as emojis on the original message as intended.
Google finally started parsing those in 2022[0].
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-imessage-reac...
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I literally had to set up a “Congratulations / Congrats” filter to auto-delete those emails because they were so frequent and numerous when various accomplishments across the org were announced. The party popper emoji at least makes that far more tolerable.
I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire org / company / world. Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence c…
I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative expectations everyone is operating under.
Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant.
You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows.
In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#320Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room. Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.
In our company we work a lot remotely and everyone is in chat when working hour. Emojis are used a lot. It's much less disturbing if n people give a thumbs up to acknowledge a message instead of everyone typing a new message "OK". Especially when they read hours later.Also "working on it" is common if someone reports a problem.
Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous reactions.