It has been said of all the senses, scent, a sense of smell is amongst the last to go, possibly because it's amongst the first to make bindings in the brain, with a remarkably direct path. Old people with aphasia and dementia can be brought into quite alert states with smells from their past like horse manure, or old perfumes.
Perfumiers change recipes because CITES don't allow use of some animal derived products, and because of price, and changing health concerns with chemicals.
Primo Levi writes of post war searches for snake shit, which contains a urea concentrate which makes lipstick bind to the skin. Circus snake handlers laugh at him because it's sold on contract to the big perfume houses, not to random chemists.
here's my redirector `https?://www\.reddit\.com(?!/(?:(?:media|gallery|settings)\b|r/\w+/s/))([/#?].*)?` regex that fixes `/s/` links as well as many others
i really need the ability to zoom in or have it larger. the default size for me (even with my browser default at 130%) is way too small for me to make anything out.
Honestly if someone were to send me a message that only required a simple acknowledgement, and that person hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged. But I suspect what you’re really wanting is typed acknowledgment?
I would probably just send the emote I would react with as a single-letter answer. If I have nothing to say beyond "thumbs up emoji" the fact that you don't like reactions doesn't, by virtue of your opinion, give me anything more interesting to say in return.
Most of the time I would be fine with the plain old read receipt + no other mail stating protest. The reactions have too different set between clients to convey enough meaning for me.
I don't want my messages acknowledged, it's just The Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know, otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say Thanks, you're paying me to do it
Although it seems the military metaphor of Two Generals' Problem which I assume you're referencing is incidental, it's ironic that in the actual military all communication from superior to subordinate must be acknowledged perfunctorily, at least in very disciplined services like the United States Marine Corps.
For example, if a sergeant says to a private "It's a nice day outside.", the private is obliged to respond, even if the statement is rhetorical. This leads to perfunctory responses, in this case it would be "Aye aye sergeant", or "Aye sergeant", or more casually "Er" or "Kill". You're not obliged to agree, just to acknowledge. Pretty similar to tapback responses in messenger apps and emails.
If this is a thing (never saw it in 20 years of active and reserve Navy service), it must be limited not just to the Marine Corps, but the ground side of the Corps, not the air side.
Sure, there's norms around how you talk on the radio, standing watch on the bridge, on chat channels for command and control, etc. But the rest of the time, the rest of the military talks to each other more or less like normal people with the addition of acknowledging relative rank.
Well there you go, I was ground side Marine Corps for four years. No comment from a superior can pass unacknowledged. Indeed we view the air wing as a place where standards are lax and you live an easier life.
> I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know
You’ve replaced “read” in the first part with “agree” in the second, and those are not at all the same thing. I can’t let you know that I haven’t read your message.
If a parent says to the other “hey, I’m running late, I need you to pick up Tiny Tim from school”, an acknowledgement is paramount even if you read, understood, and agreed to the message.
> it's just The Generals Problem.
That problem is concerned with an unreliable communication channel, which does not apply to the situation.
This question is how we get opinionated software that slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it" should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a feature.
When the medium is email, I’m not expecting a reaction as it’s async communication method and if they want to react it’s in a form of another email reply. Occasionally I need a confirmation or something and I ask for it in the email, if they just gave me a thumbs up it becomes uncertain if it’s a confirmation because I’ve learned that some people thumbs up everything just to acknowledge it and I later find out they just want to signal they’re online and on top of things but actually never read my message
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.
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.
I know of a few company cultures like this. You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected. Everything else is just noise, and employees tend to keep the noise level quite low.
> You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected.
Unfortunately, I work with humans and technology, both of whom are fallible. As such, reminders and prompts are occasionally required. Being able to tell if a message was received, read, and understood is a very useful signal.
I genuinely think that in this situation, you should do NOTHING instead of reaction. If the explicit ok is not needed, like on HN, then thumps up are not needed either.
It's a contrived situation but does represent a more general set of conversations where the need for response may be more ambiguous. There's a space where acknowledgements and reactions are useful without breaking the flow of conversation.
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 space. Which brings us back to, "Why?"
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.
They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their text representation. It's can be misleading because the text representation sometimes diverge from what the user thinks the emoji means.
This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji like most other people.
The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter, because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My proposal here would do just this, but require the sender to do nothing different than before.
Yeah, that's kinda the idea. But I'm worried about preserving messaging integrity: if you just let that person set an option to never see reactions at all, then his coworkers will be sending reactions which he won't see, which will probably lead to conflicts ("why didn't you acknowledge that you saw my message?" "I did! I sent a thumbs-up!" "I've disabled reactions, so you need to type out these acknowledgements to me." "Fuck that!" -> HR has to get involved)
Basically, the anti-reactions people are going to be angry no matter what, because the rest of the world isn't doing messaging the way they want.
Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction.
Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
Some people pay per text message received. So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication" well then I'm sorry, but their preference is my cost, so I don't think it's out of line to politely ask them not to.
Ultimately, this is something that I'd rather be handled at the carrier layer: I should be able to have my phone reject a text message and not pay for / receive it.
On the topic of configurability: Software should ultimately serve the end user. When a developer makes an undesirable (to a user) change to the software and provides the user no way to opt out of that change, it's serving the developer's interests, and it's doing a slightly worse job at serving the user.
> So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication
No, it doesn't, because that's engaging in bilateral negotiation of how the communication will go with the others involved in it. Unilaterally disabling the feature, however, is different, and that is what I was criticizing.
AFAIK it resulted in huge bill for the receiver, though I have no idea if certain services weren't billed differently (wouldn't surprise me if you could send text messages that were billed only on sender side, for extra)
> by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have
I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently.
If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on.
> it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something
For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
Well, nobody I know would respond to such a question with a reaction (an emoji, yes, a reaction, no), so this is not an issue in my crowd. I suppose (and it's obvious now that I think about it) this depends on what the social norms are in your group.
> By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things differently for you.
To a trivial degree, sure. Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
Social interaction always involves compromise and reasonable accommodations for others. In this sense, I ask people to do things differently for me every day, and they usually do. And others ask me to do things differently every day, and I usually do. It's part of the social negotiations that make societies work.
I do feel the need to reiterate that I am not opposed to reactions generally. Only in email.
> Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
It's ok either way. But it was you who claimed you don't request changes. We live in a society and all that. We can collaborate and agree on the way we communicate in groups.
For christ sake, if there is explicit question do not react with reaction only, but use words.
Because, recipient does not know whether you are acknowledging that you read that question or answering it or what. Emoji reactions are ambiguous majority of the time. Which is fine when they are used to add emotions to the discussion, but not fine when you are actually communicating with it.
