Add Reactions to Pull Requests, Issues, and Comments

https://github.com/blog/2119-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments

by WillAbides • 10 years ago

736 227 10 years ago

maaarghk2• 10 years ago

Looks like hacker news filters out emojis. My thumbs up pun has been ruined.

In all seriousness - thank god. Hopefully it won't take Google Code issue tracker like levels of effort to get people to "please star the issue if it is important to you rather than commenting with +1".

SnaKeZ2• 10 years ago

End of "+1" era?

knd775• 10 years ago

Well, I guess this at least sorta solves the "+1" issues.

thejameskyle• 10 years ago

cpr• 10 years ago

Nice to see them moving quickly on some major OSS community requests.

dpflan4• 10 years ago

I like the idea of adding more expressiveness, pictorially capturing sometimes fleeting moments of emotion or accurately representing an emotional state that can occur.

These are the following reactions:

  1. +1
  2. -1
  3. smile
  4. thinking_face
  5. heart
  6. tada

Do they capture the necessary expressiveness for the context? Facebook's reactions cover more emotions, but FB is trying to support reaction to anything that can be posted.

monsk• 10 years ago

All I want is slack's :partyparrot: and I'm satisfied.

laughinghan• 10 years ago

You may be interested to know that :partyparrot: is not built-into Slack, someone on your team had to add it: http://cultofthepartyparrot.com/

...which I just did to my team's Slack.

mayank• 10 years ago

Considering that it's Github, how about things relevant to software engineering, like: agree, disagree, support, insightful, obsolete, misleading. I can't imagine it being helpful to know that someone felt "heart" about an issue comment.

xentronium2• 10 years ago

Heart is probably a supersized +1 for pull requests and a nod to Aaron Peterson.

robszumski• 10 years ago

this was my initial reaction is well. It seems like this will just add to the noise and not help large open source projects get work done.

minimaxir• 10 years ago

I recently wrote a post about Facebook Reactions and if it would be effective at helping quantify sentiment. (http://minimaxir.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions/) The tl;dr is that I believe that Reactions are redundant outside of positive/negative classification.

GitHub actually has both +1 and -1, which satisfies me. But there's not much productive purpose with a smile/heart/tada other than to be quirky. (The thinking_face is neutral and adds nothing in this aspect)

dpflan4• 10 years ago

Yeah, as I asked below: Will this be a meaningful form of communication and is the language (subset of images) sufficient? Can small changes like this perhaps change how PRs, Comments, etc are treated? Will it be productive, a distraction, or a NOOP?

danvayn• 10 years ago

Eh...what's the point?

dpflan4• 10 years ago

I think the point is: Will this be a meaningful form of communication and is the language (subset of images) sufficient? Can small changes like this perhaps change how PRs, Comments, etc are treated? Will it be productive, a distraction, or a NOOP? Would you use this feature or have you used a feature like this?

z1mm32m4n• 10 years ago

I was a little surprised that neither :ship: nor :shipit: made the list; it seems like these frequently show up in discussions as well.

dpflan4• 10 years ago

Right, more domain-specific options would make sense.

fineline• 10 years ago

Four positive, one neutral, one negative. Balanced?

Where is the sadface to go with smile? The warface to go with heart? Or the facepalm to go with party?

TranquilMarmot• 10 years ago

I don't understand why they limited it to six responses rather than just letting you search for one and use it (the same way slack does)?

brbcoding• 10 years ago

I actually don't have :thinking_face: but have :confused: instead.

qwyxzy• 10 years ago

I think GitHub wanted an option to express "I don't understand this," and decided :confused: was a better fit. Which makes sense, because :thinking_face: could mean "I'm considering this" or "Interesting point," which is not, I think, what that option is meant to convey.

TomasEkeli• 10 years ago

Wow, Eric Elliott (@_ericelliott) just asked for this on twitter - and now it happened. He must be a witch.

richerlariviere• 10 years ago

I think it is definitely the end of +1 era, folks! Thanks Github to listen to the community feature requests. You should allow more icons like Slack is doing currently.

wilg• 10 years ago

Stoked about this feature! Can't wait until these are available in the API!

gsmethells• 10 years ago

Wow! GitHub is being influenced by GitLab (who released this feature recently in GitLab 8.4).

ikanor• 10 years ago

I am not surprised, the GitLab guys are doing a great job.

bengotow• 10 years ago

Finally. Let's just hope it doesn't email you when someone leave's a +1 reaction.

lukevers• 10 years ago

It'd be nice if you could configure this. It doesn't email you, but for some repositories it'd be nice if it did.

It definitely solves the horrible problem of too many +1s everywhere, but there are times when getting those emails are helpful.

city412• 10 years ago

I think people will still write +1 comments because they won't notice this new feature, at least initially. It'd be nice if Github just converted "+1" comments into reactions.

Nadya• 10 years ago

If I reply with :+1: am I responding to the comment above me (in context) or to the original Issue?

(Not that I do :+1: comments, but the above is a scenario where automatically converting wouldn't work.)

city412• 10 years ago

Good point. Then maybe convert +1 comments into a popup showing reactions to the user.

Or just wait for people to learn the feature over time.

dabernathy89• 10 years ago

Now it will be more appropriate to shame people for doing it, though, and hopefully that will eventually lead to changed behavior.

bsimpson• 10 years ago

Looks like Dear GitHub[1] is having a rather quick impact on the product; first templates[2], now this:

[1] https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github

[2] https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-template...

braythwayt2• 10 years ago

Perhaps it follows the Hollywood model. There are lots of features in development, staff-shipped, in discussion, in the backlog, or whatever. Then there is some external stimulus (Facebook launched reactions!) and the feature gets quickly tailored and green-lighted.

So there is a quick reaction, but work on the idea may have been hidden from the public for a long time.

x10242• 10 years ago

That's a bit suspicious, really. A feature like "Reactions to a comment" doesn't take two years to implement, even with all the scaling considerations. And people have been complaining about that for at least two years.

shurcooL• 10 years ago

Version 3.4.0 of Octicons [0] came out on January 22, 2016. It added "smiley" icon, which was used in this feature today. That's 8 days after the dear github letter. 7 weeks before today.

[0] https://github.com/github/octicons/releases/tag/v3.4.0

gjreda• 10 years ago

This is a welcome addition. I've run into bugs in projects before and wanted to "+1" a thread, but it always felt like spamming the maintainers.

It'd be cool if they added a way to search through your list of reactions. This would allow you to effectively comment on an issue in an OS project, while simultaneously bookmarking it, so that you can go back and commit a fix when you have a free moment.

siegecraft• 10 years ago

In that scenario, I just subscribe to the issue, so at least I get notified if something changes. But of course there is no way to list the issues you're subscribing to.

SnaKeZ2• 10 years ago

Could they convert the exiting "+1" comments into reaction?

jstr• 10 years ago

How would they know which comment to attribute them to?

aldanor• 10 years ago

Something like

    ^\s*(:\+1:|\+\d+)\s*\!*\s*$

Even something as simple as this would clean up most of threads like these: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/1084

rocky1138• 10 years ago

Emojis are terrible, but they're better than "+1".

dkopi• 10 years ago

The best way to +1 an issue is with a pull request.

Sir_Cmpwn• 10 years ago

A missing feature here is sorting issues by public support. An example is FontAwesome, which explicitly asks users to leave a +1 comment on issues they support. You can then get a pretty good idea of the most desired features by sorting the issues by most commented.

https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/blob/master/CONT...

https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues?q=is%3Ais...

Would also be nice to see these reactions on the issue list so you can get a feel for the issues at a glance without digging deep into each one.

shoyer• 10 years ago

Agreed -- this is the first thing I looked for. My guess is that this feature is probably next on their TODO list. There's not much point in sorting by +1s before there are many +1s accumulated, anyways.

fiatjaf• 10 years ago

GitHub: social coding

ma138• 10 years ago

Awesome move by GitHub. ZenHub[1] will be phasing out our +1 button now that it's no longer needed – feels good to focus. We're excited to use this reactions data as part of our reporting suite, please keep the improvements coming!

[1] https://www.zenhub.io/

yuribit• 10 years ago

Is there a way to sort by "reactions"? Otherwise I think this feature is useless.. I would have preferred having more detailed issues rather than ugly Emojis.

jwilk• 10 years ago

Um. What does :+1: mean when applied to an issue? "I like this bug"?!

npizzolato• 10 years ago

Typically, I think it would mean "I would like this issue/request to be fixed/implemented."

dcgoss2• 10 years ago

It's supposed to mean: "I agree" or "I have this bug too" or "Yes, this should be implemented"

CM303• 10 years ago

I think this bug is an awesome thing and shouldn't be fixed? Something like that would actually be surprisingly useful.

But seriously, it likely means the person up voting the issue has also had the same problem and wants it fixed as quickly as possible.

hk__2• 10 years ago

“I have the same problem” or “I’m able to reproduce” maybe?

imtringued2• 10 years ago

You want the contributers to focus on this issue.

mkobit• 10 years ago

I don't think these necessarily cover all of the responses that can be made, but I think it is a great start to getting simple feedback like this. Like other users mentioned, it would be awesome to be able to sort or perform some kind of action based on the quantify of the reactions.

I wonder if they will allow for repository owners to select which reactions they will allow? I think that would help with the limited selection but still allow owners to select what they consider useful to them.

mrharrison6• 10 years ago

-1 or the thumbs down reaction, I think is a mistake. They aren't usually that constructive, because most of the time they are used as retaliation against a specific user, instead of constructive criticism. If someone downvotes you, you tend to downvote them. At the least, it should be a privilege to down vote, like SO and HN do. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down

joshmanders• 10 years ago

Coincidentally you're being downvoted for stating this.

mrharrison6• 10 years ago

Yeah, I thought that was funny. Guess I wrote a horrible comment.

joepie91_9• 10 years ago

I just want to elaborate on this a bit more: Implementing a downvote button is inviting baseless disagreement. It makes it socially acceptable to say that you disagree, without ever providing an argument or being expected to do so - this is precisely what you don't want, on what is supposed to be a constructive platform.

This will (indirectly and directly) lead to populism, where unpopular opinions get dismissed out of hand without even considering them.

Seriously, GitHub, this is rule one of designing constructive social platforms: you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

Lazare2• 10 years ago

Seriously, GitHub, this is rule one of designing constructive social platforms: you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

It seems ironic you'd post this on a platform that has a downvote button.

yazaddaruvala• 10 years ago

Without agreeing or disagreeing, StackExchange/Reddit are hugely popular and both have downvotes.

braythwayt2• 10 years ago

And yet, you’re making this point on a platform that has down-votes. And where I have made very unpopular statements around social issues that have been down-voted for being unpopular, so I appreciate how points that I know to be reasonable can be downvoted for being unpopular.

Nevertheless, some people find them useful.

I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes. I’d say that downvotes need to be implemented in conjunction with a bunch of other features and active moderation policies to work well. I don’t know if HN has done so, or if GitHub has done so. But... I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.

(FWIW, I follow this policy: I either downvote, or reply, but never both. In this case, I disagree with you, but think the conversation is useful, so I reply. Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.)

CM303• 10 years ago

I disagree with the last one. As someone who's been involved with quite a few forums and social sites, the down button tends to get abused a lot less than you'd think. Heck, the most popular plugin for XenForo ratings goes further and lets people mark replies as dumb, old or 'drama queen'. Those don't seem to get abused too much either, surprisingly enough.

But I guess it's a size and topic thing. If your site has a mature userbase, a limited topic or is mostly a pretty tight knit community, adding a downvote button tends to be a decent enough thing to do. Same if you have to acquire the privilege to use it.

adnzzzzZ4• 10 years ago

you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

People who don't agree with something should have a way of expressing their views. Why is it acceptable to have a +1 button but not a -1 button? Why can people agree without giving any reason for their agreement but they can't disagree without giving any reason for their agreement? It's crazy that society works in this way and that people have such an irrational response to disagreement.

DanBC2• 10 years ago

Very many HN threads would be improved if people would just downvote for disagreement and shut the fuck up.

Those downvotes would soon be corrected by other people reading the thread, and we wouldn't have to read bad tempered bickering.

cdelsolar• 10 years ago

I disagree.

ywecur• 10 years ago

How would privilege to down vote help?

choward4• 10 years ago

It's also lame that you can thumbs up and thumbs down the same comment.

gkoberger3• 10 years ago

Agreed 100% for Facebook or even Hacker News, however on GitHub it would be really useful for voting.

If you ask "Should we add this feature?", it's hard to understand what favorites mean if you don't have an anchor. Does 10 thumbs-up mean unanimous support, or is it just a small minority? It'd be nice to say "Oh, 10 upvotes... but there's 90 downvotes, so we won't do it."

FB and Hacker News are a marketplace of relatively-inconsequential ideas and thoughts. However, changes discussed on GitHub Issues can potentially have an impact on your company and livelihood.

hayksaakian• 10 years ago

on facebook they say "like if you want A and share if you want B" obviously this is a 'viral marketing' ploy, but something similar would be simple for github

just write:

thumbs up if you want A smile if you want B

problem solved

rtpg2• 10 years ago

Internally when voting (informally) on things we do +1, +0, -0, and -1. Super helpful to be able to ask for everyone's opinion while they can also express the strength of their opinion.

Feel like that would be very useful

mrharrison6• 10 years ago

Commenting should be how people down vote. You should have to explain why it's not a good idea. Then if others agree with you, your comment will get up voted. Just as my comment is a downvote of github's downvote.

joeyespo7• 10 years ago

Sounds like a pre-optimization. You can get the same level of information with two comments and vote exclusively with +1's, but without the general negative aspects of what's mentioned above.

cpuguy83• 10 years ago

But the reality is, on larger projects voting doesn't help, won't work, etc.

I guess for the 90% it's ok. It'd be nice to be able to turn off.

anantzoid• 10 years ago

Also, it helps in taking the community point of view. Right now, if a newbie submits a PR, one of the project maintainer might just diss him and claim his PR to be irrelevant. But if there are already some 10 likes, the latter might give a second thought and might look at it from a different perspective.

nv-vn3• 10 years ago

Maybe it would be better to make real user polls then? Or how about just making the downvote optional when creating the issue/PR? I think in general, down voting serves more bad than good on nearly any medium.

mrharrison6• 10 years ago

This comment is basically a down vote of github's down vote. Comments should be the down vote, because someone needs to explain why a suggestion, answer, code change, submission, etc... is not a good option. If that comment (down vote) is a good idea, it will then be up voted.

jbrooksuk2• 10 years ago

Why should you never have to explain why you're in agreement with something? What kind of culture do we have if you only have to explain why you disagree with something?

xentronium2• 10 years ago

But there could already be a reasonable explanation for -1 vote in the thread. Are you suggesting to repeat it or write "agree with @foobar on his comment"? That's more noise.

jakobegger• 10 years ago

I think that the -1 button definitely has a place on Github.

I use Github a lot for discussing future feature development, and in that context it is really valuable to see how many people think a feature is useful or not.

Github isn't primarily a social network. In a professional context it is essential that you can also express disagreement, or that you think something is a bad idea.

rlidwka2• 10 years ago

In a professional context it is essential that people can express disagreement provided they write exact reasons why they disagree.

You know, "+1" usually has only one meaning:

   - "I agree with whatever you're saying".

"-1" has however two separate meanings:

   - "I disagree with whatever you're saying because I believe that blah-blah-blah (reasons here)"

   - "I disagree with whatever you're saying because fuck you that's why"

And "-1" button doesn't distinguish between those two cases.

toomim• 10 years ago

You just contradicted yourself. You're giving a -1 on giving -1s.

kmm• 10 years ago

No they don't, because they're giving an actual argument. They're probably not again disagreement, but against mass disagreement without requiring to substantiate that disagreement.

makecheck• 10 years ago

There has to be some way to register negative feedback so that you can find out what is widely unpopular. The key is to lower the power of individual down-votes so that an idea can’t be easily trashed to the point where most visitors won’t even consider reading it. (I find myself doing this sub-consciously in review sites and app stores for instance, where once something falls to about 3 stars I don’t even want to see what the fuss is about, I just skip it.)

One thing I’ve never seen is a vote that accounts for the number of unique visitors, or the total time that visitors spend on a page, or even contributor status, before weighing feedback. An issue that isn’t immediately important to a lot of people should require some time to decide popular/unpopular status.

A page shouldn’t show up/down status to anybody* until a significant amount of feedback has been collected, either. This would prevent knee-jerk down-votes of ideas that seem unpopular to everyone based on a few early down-voters. A proposal should stand on its own, at first. After a certain time period, the page could reveal whether or not an idea has really turned out to be popular, and at that point the cost of up-vote/down-vote could change (e.g. maybe only comments are allowed at that point, and no simple clicks).

barce• 10 years ago

I think thoughtful comments with advice on how to refactor is a way better indicator than giving my PRs over to the mob. Ya thumbs down or any reaction with code is a mistake.

Pxtl• 10 years ago

I do find that non-anonymous downvotes go better than anonymous ones, particularly w small communities.

Downvotes are particularly relevant for feature requests that may have substantial negative impact.

I'd actually implement downvotes/upvotes as zero-length comments so that they can be moderated and replied to.

philliphaydon• 10 years ago

I shall respectfully disagree. Not wanting down votes is just a way of saying "I'm offended please don't offend me I can't handle down it's it makes me sad"

It's 2016, can we stop worrying about if someone disagrees with you and just accept the fact they wanted to down vote on an issue rather than say nothing or leave a comment.

echelon• 10 years ago

It's usually the case that it's cheap to disagree. It would be more beneficial to the review process to have those with dissenting opinions lay out a logical case presenting their concerns rather than enable them to do quicker, drive-by review.

Haven't you had feedback along the lines of, "but did you take into consideration what impact the heat death of the universe will have on your design?" ?

nv-vn3• 10 years ago

No, it's because downvotes actively censor unpopular opinions based on the fact that they're unpopular rather than their merit. Check out reddit some time and you'll see this happen a lot.

Wintamute• 10 years ago

It depends on how the PR, project or comment thread interprets the -1s. If a vote has been specifically requested then the +1/-1s are super useful. Otherwise they could be safely ignored by maintainers as at most low value ambient info ... well worded constructive criticism will always carry more weight that a -1. Also, this is fundamentally different to SO/HN ... there is no ranking, the up-vote/down-vote ratio has zero effect aside from incrementing a counter - any meaning applied is subjective.

bradgessler• 10 years ago

Combining +1 and -1 is a mistake. It would be useful to see thumbs-up separate from thumbs-down to get a gut feel for contention.

CM303• 10 years ago

Yeah, that's definitely the best way of handling a rating system. The one I use on my sites (the XenForo mod one) counts likes, dislikes, agrees, disagrees and all the other ratings individually and displays that count under every post.

GitHub should have done the same here.

inopinatus2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure this is a downvote. It's a vote in favour of a negative and unlike HN-style downvoting, is tallied separately. You can even react with both thumbs-up and thumbs-down to the same issue.

With a tallied up/downvote system a la HN you can't tell, numerically, if a score of 1 meant "only one person cared" or "hundreds cared and there was furious disagreement".

Actually I'd be interested in a "top 100 most polarising comments" feed :-)

Ensorceled2• 10 years ago

Disagreement should not be restricted to only those who are willing to stick their neck out and publicly disagree and state their reasons.

Imagine this scenario. Linus Torvalds posts an utterly inane pull request. Who is willing to deal with the backlash of "disagreeing with Linus". Sure, many are, but many are not.

nv-vn3• 10 years ago

Still not a fan of how it's done on SO. To me the best solution is not to include it at all. If you have something negative to say about a PR or Issue, it makes more sense to explain why you feel that way instead of outright saying no. The +1 makes it very clear that you're saying "this covers my use-case." What does -1 mean here, other than "I don't want this"? Because not wanting something is not a reason not to include it when everybody is using a project for a different use-case.

jkire• 10 years ago

I wonder if this is too featureful? What is the difference between +1, heart, and hooray? Having just a +1 and -1 is unambiguous and probably covers the vast amount of use cases? Perhaps not, but I'd be very interested to know the reasoning between being choosing between "unambiguous" and expressive.

krock• 10 years ago

I think I will use them this way:

* '+1' to mean I like this feature or this issue affects me.

* 'heart' to mean I agree with a proposed solution, or pull request.

* 'hooray' when a solution is marked as fixed or a fix version has been posted for the issue.

There are no rules though, so we'll see.

mattcantstop• 10 years ago

Internally at GitHub over the past few weeks I have been using the heart reaction to express appreciation. For example, if someone is very helpful or empathetic I let them know I appreciate it with a heart.

sergiotapia• 10 years ago

It's just for fun, don't read too much into it.

akie• 10 years ago

Relatively sure they didn't follow as thorough a design process as Facebook did: https://medium.com/facebook-design/reactions-not-everything-...

zamalek• 10 years ago

People have been using emoji comments to express not only reactions but also for voting. Even if you were to add voting features (which reaction emojis can be used for) you'd probably still get unbearable amounts of zero-value comments comprising of a single emoji, "+1" or gifs.

This is probably an attempt to break that "user habit" by providing a tempting alternative to the type of person who spams comments in issues.

Additionally, by using emojis for voting maintainers get slightly richer data about how users feel about something. A user story with 1000 thumbsups might fall lower in the backlog than a user story with 1000 hearts.

looneysquash• 10 years ago

I assume this is inspired by gitlab's similar feature?

hiphopyo• 10 years ago

Speaking about new features -- what I'd like to see is the ability to remove items from my public profile / activities list. Often I make mistakes. Often I do stuff I don't want the public to see, and I'd rather not have to email GitHub support asking them to remove them manually all the time.

lettergram• 10 years ago

Getting dangerously close to that Facebook patent[1]...

[1] http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8918339.html

choward4• 10 years ago

Am I missing something or is there still no way to +1 issues? All I see are ways to react to comments. Whenever I feel the urge to "+1" something it's for the issue, not a specific comment. Can someone explain how to add a reaction to an issue?

dcre• 10 years ago

You are missing something :)

e.g., top right corner on https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/6239

choward4• 10 years ago

I still only see it for the comment and not the issue itself.

Animats• 10 years ago

I'd keep downvotes, but lose the emoji.

Mikushi• 10 years ago

April 1st is not there yet. I get the idea, but seriously, emojis...

yxe• 10 years ago

Yeah I panicked and checked my calendar

chrismonsanto• 10 years ago

Can you downvote replies in threads that are locked? Can collaborators delete these reactions like we would with comments?

Have feedback on this post? Let know on Twitter.

Not everyone uses Twitter. It would be awesome to give feedback using the one account I'm guaranteed to have: a GitHub account. Otherwise I have to ask my question on HN...

donretag• 10 years ago

"So go ahead…:+1: or :tada: to your :heart:s content."

Or please don't. Part of the problem with the +1s is that they add noise. How are reactions going to cut down on the noise? Telling people to go ahead a +1 an issue (increase noise) is the opposite of what the "Dear Github" maintainers want.

Many projects do not use +1 or any other voting scheme to illicit priority from the general public. +1 comments and reactions provide little value. I have seen Github issues where people +1 already closed issues because they do not bother reading.

WillAbides3• 10 years ago

One more reaction just iterates a number next to an emoji. It doesn't add a comment and nobody gets a notification.

roblabla• 10 years ago

It reduces noise because a reaction is not a reply: it doesn't notify the issue author of a response and takes a lot less space visually, letting discussions about an issue take place without being intermixed with a bunch of :+1:.

Reactions let you know the impact an issue may be having. I suppose it may not be good for every project, but dismissing it as "providing little value" seems a bit too much considering it was among the most often asked features by maintainers...

mrmondo• 10 years ago

Ah yes, following in the steps of Gitlab which has had this for a while, the thumbs up / down and voting types are useful, everything is a distraction IMO

sytse• 10 years ago

GitLab had emoji on issues/MR's but not emoji's on comments, we're working on that for 8.7 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3655

ruffrey• 10 years ago

Why is the thumbs up a white hand, and thumbs down is a yellow hand?!

WillAbides3• 10 years ago

It's a social commentary

a_bonobo• 10 years ago

They are both yellow for me on Fedora 22, one is just a flipped version of the other

voaie• 10 years ago

Well, I think a voting pool is more practical than manually counting upvote/downvote of every comment. I don't know how often the maintainers will come back and see how an issue is going and see which comments are popular. Also, sorting comments is not fun because of duplicated contents.

bhaumik• 10 years ago

First* Slack, then Facebook, and now GitHub. Looks like reactions are replacing (or expanding on..) the unary like/upvote/heart expression for tech products.

*Or at least the first time I've seen them used as an important feature.

ben336• 10 years ago

I think Path was the first to do this: https://path.com/

franciscop• 10 years ago

Awesome! Just a niptick, I think the reaction action should be near where the interface is. So either change the icon to make a reaction to bottom left, or change where it's shown to the right (where milestone, tags, etc are).

This way you get better feedback.

southpolesteve• 10 years ago

This makes me think Github doesn't get it. Emoji comments are often used because there is no better way to interact with an issue/PR. What we need are better issue management tools. Polls, voting, triage tools, etc. Instead we got an easier way to post emojis. Feels more like a "look we have reactions like slack!!!" gimmick rather than a properly designed response to user requests for features.

purpleidea• 10 years ago

Ironically, you can't respond with a :reaction: to their "reactions" post.

dj_doh• 10 years ago

-1 or thumbs down reaction should be avoided.

auscompgeek• 10 years ago

Kinda makes you wish you could :+1: the blog post.

zuxfer• 10 years ago

also, it would be good to convert any comment or message with just +1 as reactions.

cleans up the existing issue threads.

_qbjt• 10 years ago

That's cool. But what I'd really like is the ability to star comments so I can revisit them later.

roryokane• 10 years ago

As a substitute, you can click on a comment’s timestamp and then bookmark the current URL, which will be a permalink to that comment.

silverwind• 10 years ago

The implementation feels a bit rushed. Here are my suggestions:

- Don't allow a user to rate his own posts.

- Don't allow a user to issue contradicting votes like +1 and -1 at the same time.

- Use image emoji like everywhere else on the site for compatibilty.

jmspring• 10 years ago

I find the idea of adding social responses to github distasteful. It's my own opinion.

That said, it'd be interesting to see a breakdown by age and background in terms of supporting or not supporting this addition.

jorgecurio• 10 years ago

I can just imagine this being abused by less socially aware on the autism spectrum disorder, I definitely think it's wrong and toxic to add mechanisms which support non constructive criticisms or praise that leads to emoticon circle jerks.

PeterStuer2• 10 years ago

Interesting cultural bias. Why are people not questioning unsubstantiated up-votes, but feel down-voters shouldn't be let of the hook without a full argumentation?

esailija2• 10 years ago

Upvote is already backed by the arguments the upvoted post contains. Downvote is not backed by those arguments. They are not symmetrical at all and there is no bias.

PeterStuer2• 10 years ago

That is only true if the upvoted post contained an argumentation and not just a statement or an observation.

Illniyar• 10 years ago

While I applaud finally adding the vote up (and even vote down) features, this feature look a bit overdesigned.

I don't really get how I should "love" an issue, or "this issue makes me happy". Or the relevance of a "thinking face". The ui would be simpler with only 1 or 2 icons.

At least there's no "this issue makes me sad/angry" buttons.

x10242• 10 years ago

"Facebook does this way, so we do it this way."

peterwaller• 10 years ago

My emojis look weird and not in keeping with the style of emojis elsewhere on the site http://imgur.com/rB9BdEr

jbrooksuk2• 10 years ago

A step in the right direction, nice!

One thing I don't like is that you're able to add multiple reactions to the same item, it sends mixed signals.

bigethan• 10 years ago

It'd be nice if they added a little warning whenever submitting a comment that was only a '+1' or '-1' otherwise the discoverability is gonna take a while, maybe? Also a option to convert those comments into reactions for repository owners.

nmstoker• 10 years ago

My apologies if i missed a comment, but I'm surprised how few people support "giving it a go" and then deciding if it's good or bad. There's a multitude of user approaches, lots of people very touchy about their way of doing things (some extra so as this relates to their profession) Whilst not wishing to appear a fanboy, clearly Github have put a decent amount of thought into this, they've got a fairly good track record and they're responsive. If it's poor, they'll reassess it.

edelans• 10 years ago

Funny how I wanted to +1 this blog post =)

vaibhavkul• 10 years ago

How about a stop (hand palm) [1] instead of -1?

[1] http://emojipedia.org/raised-hand/

odbol_• 10 years ago

The great thing about adding emoji Reactions to all our social media posts is that now AIs can finally learn human emotion. I'm sure Google is already training theirs on how different keywords make people feel.

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