Reacting to comments with Emojis

We love using coda for project management!

One thing that gets a bit redundant / time sapping is the inability to react to a comment with an emoji. Right now I have to make a new comment each time whilst also searching for an emoji to use.

It would be cool if there was just a little bar with my frequently used that I can quickly click to react. Much like slack!

:soon: :wink:

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Can’t wait @Brian_Klein ! :heart:

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Despite the fact that there is some science-backed benefits of emoticons, I think we’re missing opportunities to create deeper and more sustainable knowledge if we encourage a move toward para-linguistics.

I’m old, so there’s that, but I’ve noticed over the past 30 years that its become increasingly difficult to get workers to write anything. The lack of expressive words all linked together in the correct order for status reporting, product planning, and ideation has caused issues that are especially noticeable and often debilitating in startups.

Imagine if I had reacted to your suggestion with a :-1: .

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Some great points Bill. I for one love emoticons though because they help me express how I am feeling in that message rather than coming off blunt.

In a remote/async world this is really important. I wonder if there is a good way to find a balance between both of our points?

I’m groping for the :agree-in-principle: emoticon without much success.

hahaha point well made :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Don’t you mean : touché: I’m LOL’ing.

But more seriously, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with para-linguistics. I like it when people and systems communicate more efficiently and symbolics – whether interpreted by human eyes or machine vision, or even in code – each have some benefit.

But… where emoticons fail is two general areas.

  1. They cannot imply, suggest, or even intimate a remedy. If you believe something is wrong, or you cannot support a concept, an emoji (or two) does nothing to help; it simply registers a state.

  2. They cannot help anyone reach the same conclusion of the emoji-commenter. Conversations are necessary to create logical pathways to understanding about complex ideas that are not always obvious.

If you incentivize the use of emojis or otherwise disincentivize solicitation for verbal or written commentary with thought behind it, you may create an unintended dumbing-down of the feedback loop. Feedback loops are already delicate; even the slightest incentives could disrupt information flow.

And if you believe video and audio artifacts are more effective, just make sure you have automated transcripts so your stuff is findable in the grand scheme of knowledge management and sustainable memes that offset corporate amnesia.

IoT vs IoR

We’re all familiar with the Internet of Things; small, IP-enabled devices that act as sensors. The Internet of Recognition (IoR) involves machine vision; the ability for a single sensor to interpret context and deeper understanding by sampling video frames across time. Oddly, a single machine vision sensor can virtualize the logic for thousands of IoT sensors.

Emoticons are like IoT sensors; they report state. They may be able to tell you how hot the fire is, but they cannot tell you what color the flames are (a metric that firefighters care deeply about). The Internet of Recognition makes it possible for one sensor to extract meaning, context, and scope much the way words express scope, context, and meaning.

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