You can see something I honestly dislike very much in discussions - a "bombing" of emoji reactions during discussions.
For instance, the "I think this comment is completely appropriate" has 35 "+"-sign emojis. I find this concept of "reaction bulldozing" to cause any discussion to be shut down prematurely. Adding a reaction like that is so simple to do and doesn't require any effort, it's very easy to do, but actually adding your own opinion or nuanced explanation is very much harder, especially when the other side then already has so many "reaction emojis". I feel like the "signal-to-effort" ratio is completely skewed by this. You'd have to be a very assertive person to pierce through it and offer your, possibly only slightly, different opinion after seeing this.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that I dislike about it - does it stifle discussion? Does it diminish diversity of opinions? I think it does, if you're not early enough to give a dissenting opinion then it's you against the group, and I'm guessing a lot of people at that point would rather not react at all anymore.
Am I alone in thinking this? Is there a solution for this? I often encounter this phenomenon in discussions with engineers, not just with contentious topics like nazi's, but also e.g. styleguide or architectural discussions. I hope there's a word for it so I can learn how to deal with it, because currently I really can't pinpoint it.
So on the one hand you recognise that the reaction emojis require little effort, but on the other hand you feel that the reaction emojis provide emotional friction to you adding your own nuanced explanation?
It's a common situation and the discomfort you feel is probably similar to what a woman feels when she wants to report unwelcome sexual advances or outright sexual harassment in a mostly-male workplace.
Though I suspect the discomfort a woman feels in that instance is significantly more crippling to her than the feeling you're getting about the nuanced argument you wanted to provide about whether closing braces for the "then" clause should go in a separate line to the "else" statement.
The solution is to carefully choose which battles you participate in, and which hill you want to die on.
In the screenshots in the article posted by bmiller2 https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232766/github-employees...
You can see something I honestly dislike very much in discussions - a "bombing" of emoji reactions during discussions.
For instance, the "I think this comment is completely appropriate" has 35 "+"-sign emojis. I find this concept of "reaction bulldozing" to cause any discussion to be shut down prematurely. Adding a reaction like that is so simple to do and doesn't require any effort, it's very easy to do, but actually adding your own opinion or nuanced explanation is very much harder, especially when the other side then already has so many "reaction emojis". I feel like the "signal-to-effort" ratio is completely skewed by this. You'd have to be a very assertive person to pierce through it and offer your, possibly only slightly, different opinion after seeing this.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that I dislike about it - does it stifle discussion? Does it diminish diversity of opinions? I think it does, if you're not early enough to give a dissenting opinion then it's you against the group, and I'm guessing a lot of people at that point would rather not react at all anymore.
Am I alone in thinking this? Is there a solution for this? I often encounter this phenomenon in discussions with engineers, not just with contentious topics like nazi's, but also e.g. styleguide or architectural discussions. I hope there's a word for it so I can learn how to deal with it, because currently I really can't pinpoint it.