👎

[j-f1]

This does make the reaction button shrinkage on mobile worse, not sure how to resolve that:

• Update “react to comment” endpoint

[nicholasvadasz]

Currently, we aren't entirely sure if we want to go forward with having a thumbs down reaction. In general, we want a really good reason to add a "main feed" feature, since at this point there has been ~5000 posts without the ability to thumbs down, skewing how these posts may be looked at in the future. Additionally, there are many downstream effects to a thumbs down reaction. We would need to think about whether a thumb down should increase or decrease a post's hot score (the internal score we use for the hot feed), whether a thumbs down should raise or lower a comment's place in the comment section, whether it should contribute to user's XP, etc...

On a more meta level, I personally wonder if having a thumbs down reaction would make Dear Blueno a more argumentative space, where content is viewed more so as whether it is "correct" or "incorrect." From a user perspective, it feels better for your comment to get no reactions than a bunch of thumbs down.

The post that introduced the idea of a thumbs down reaction did get a lot of support however, so we will continue thinking about this internally. Would love to hear your thoughts.

[NicholasBottone]

There are a few things I'm noticing:

• On the frontend, the order of the reactions is inconsistent - sometimes dislike is the second index, and sometimes it is the last index.
• On the backend, only the "react to post" endpoint was updated, the "react to comment" endpoint was not updated.
• This change to the expected format of the reactions array would likely require a database migration.
• Additionally, there is the issue of "scoring" the negative reactions. Currently, any reaction will increase the score of the post/comment, causing the post to rise on the hot/top sorts. Like/heart/laugh reactions award XP to public commentors. Dislike reactions, which are purely negative, should probably not have this effect of boosting the post/comment or rewarding the author.

[j-f1]

On the frontend, the order of the reactions is inconsistent - sometimes dislike is the second index, and sometimes it is the last index.

When are you seeing this? The underlying issue is that dislike had to be added at the end because reactions are identified by index rather than name, and then I sort it back to second place on the frontend.

On the backend, only the "react to post" endpoint was updated, the "react to comment" endpoint was not updated.

Added a task for that above, will get to it eventually.

This change to the expected format of the reactions array would likely require a database migration.

I thought it would be reasonable to not have 👎 on older posts to clarify that it wasn’t an option when they were posted. Would be a bit weird UX-wise but I think it’s good that people don’t falsely think that old posts just weren’t disliked by anyone.

Additionally, there is the issue of "scoring" the negative reactions. Currently, any reaction will increase the score of the post/comment, causing the post to rise on the hot/top sorts. Like/heart/laugh reactions award XP to public commentors. Dislike reactions, which are purely negative, should probably not have this effect of boosting the post/comment or rewarding the author.

While it might be reasonable to skip giving XP to people when their comments get a dislike reaction, I think boosting posts that gets lots of dislikes would make sense, just as people alugh-reacting to posts today boosts them. A big part of DB is the drama and boosting highly disliked / controversial posts helps with that :)

That said, I think using a thumbs down as a signal to reduce a comment’s prominence would make sense (replying to @nicholasvadasz above)

On a more meta level, I personally wonder if having a thumbs down reaction would make Dear Blueno a more argumentative space, where content is viewed more so as whether it is "correct" or "incorrect." From a user perspective, it feels better for your comment to get no reactions than a bunch of thumbs down.

I think this is already happening with laugh reactions. And you know that DB is already an argumenative space :)

I think that if you say something really dumb on Dear Blueno it should get downvoted and you should feel bad, it isn’t a design flaw that being a fool online makes you feel bad IMO.