What do the plans for incorporating "new ways to say thanks" look like?

Question

A recent Tweet from @StackOverflow on Twitter said:

Announcing our new reactions feature, available today on Stack Overflow for Teams for Basic and Business tiers, and coming to Enterprise in 2020.

New ways of saying 'thanks' will be coming to the Stack Exchange network next year, too.

_{(emphasis added)}

The emojis look like an SOS symbol, a party emoji, a highfive / plea (still unclear on that), and a "100".

For the benefit of users who aren't on Teams, what does this currently look like?

More importantly, what are the current plans for what this will look like when it hits the SE network? Will it be the same set of emojis? What will the rep requirements to use them be? Will people be able to see who reacted what or will they be anonymous? Will you get a notification for reactions? Is there a limit to how many you can use in a day? Are there badges related to either giving or receiving them?

What will these reactions look like when they hit the broader network?

Answer 1

NOTE: a modified version, allowing only 'Thanks' as a reaction on answers, is currently being tested on the public Stack Overflow.

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For the benefit of users who aren't on Teams, what does this currently look like?

I've added this information to the reactions tag wiki on Meta Stack Overflow:

For questions about reactions, canned responses in the form of icons ('celebrate', 'help', 'thanks' and '100') to posts on stack-overflow-for-teams.

The first screenshot is the popup you use to add a reaction to a post; the second one shows the current list of reactions.

Will people be able to see who reacted what or will they be anonymous?

Yes, see the second screenshot.

Will you get a notification for reactions?

No, you don't get notifications for them.

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The above information is just to inform you how they currently look like. The tweet says

New ways of saying 'thanks' will be coming to the Stack Exchange network next year, too.

which could be interpreted as meaning that the networkwide feature will have roughly the same purpose, but it will be different than the Reactions feature on Stack Overflow for Teams.

Answer 2

Github added similar emoji "Reactions to Pull Requests, Issues, and Comments" a few years ago:

https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments/

This feature was specifically created in response to an issue raised in the "Dear GitHub" open letter sent by members of the GitHub / Open Source community:

https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github

• Issues often accumulate content-less “+1” comments which serve only to spam the maintainers and any others subscribed to the issue. These +1s serve a valuable function in letting maintainers know how widespread an issue is, but their drawbacks are too great. We’d like issues to gain a first-class voting system, and for content-less comments like “+1” or “👍” or “me too” to trigger a warning and instructions on how to use the voting mechanism.

In my experience these emoji have been hugely beneficial in GitHub PRs, issues, and comment threads - essentially a quick way to upvote/downvote a post, but also allowing you to express reactions such as "love" or "confused" or "celebration".

There's less of an obvious immediate need on SE, where posts can already be upvoted/downvoted (or easily edited/deleted) to solve many of the same problems raised in the GitHub letter.

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P.S. here was GitHub's response to the community open letter:

Dear Open Source Maintainers,

We hear you and we're sorry. We've been slow to respond to your letter and slow to respond to your frustrations.

We're working hard to fix this. Over the next few weeks we'll begin releasing a number of improvements to Issues, many of which will address the specific concerns raised in the letter. But we're not going to stop there. We'll continue to focus on Issues moving forward by adding new features, responding to feedback, and iterating on the core experience. We've also got a few surprises in store.

Issues haven't gotten much attention from GitHub these past few years and that was a mistake, but we've never stopped thinking about or caring about you and your communities. However, we know we haven't communicated that. So in addition to improving Issues, we're also going to kick off a few initiatives that will help give you more insight into what's on our radar. We want to make sharing feedback with GitHub less of a black box experience and we want to hear your ideas and concerns regularly.

We'll be in touch next week. Sorry it's taken so long, and thank you for everything.

—GitHub

Answer 3

I think those ways of conveying thanks aren't worth the bytes it takes to record them, because they don't say much more than "thanks", which is what an up vote does.

But that does not mean a systematic or structured means for communicating a more nuanced way of saying "thanks" might not be useful. In theory, although I am mildly sceptical.

Perhaps something communicating why someone is thankful might be better. Like,

• "thanks, that saved me much time"
• "thanks, I learned something useful for the future"
• "thanks, I avoided a potential disaster"
• "thanks, you explained an important thing that is elsewhere obscured by technical details and jargon"

Why would that be better? Because a structured means might at a glance communicate to potential readers why they might want to read the post. It might also save them time, teach them, enable them to avoid a disaster, and so on. Being able to see something about the post at a glance is the benefit over recording thanks in free form comments. If posts can be sorted or filtered by reactions, they could also help with searching in a way that thanks in comments can't.