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Hrishi Mittal
Hrishi Mittal

Posted on

Do you use the 🤔 reaction on dev.to seriously?

Every time I get one of these 🤔 reactions to my posts here, I can't help but think that people are throwing shade 😃.

Am I alone?

Top comments (9)

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michael profile image
Michael Lee 🍕

Hahahaha I definitely feel you Hrishi when I see folks react with that emoji. Perhaps because it is ambiguous it is easier to misinterpret the emoji as negative? When I see the set of reaction emojis as a whole, I'm like oh maybe it ain't bad. But definitely when I see it in my feed, I'm like hmmm are they doubting what I wrote?

I'm not sure if ambiguity was intentional but if it wasn't, perhaps if the devs of dev.to would add a title property to the button so that it's more clear that it is a thinking button or something like "made me think"? It wasn't until I looked at the source that I actually realized that's what the meaning behind that reaction is called.

Also kind of funny that the class name is "article-reaction-butt" for those buttons. Shorthand I'm sure but made me chuckle.

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val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca

I take it and use it seriously as "this made me think" but can also be "not sure if I agree, but thinking"

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foresthoffman profile image
Forest Hoffman

I also assume it means as much. It's easy to think of the worst possible situation when you have an ambiguous emoji like that. If anything I take it as an "this was interesting." In my book, if someone reads something I wrote and finds it the least bit interesting, I've done my job. That's my two cents at least.

Also, I 🤔'd this post for fun. ;)

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hrishio profile image
Hrishi Mittal

Valentin, you're a better man than me.

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

I only use the HEART "vote".

I'm not sure what the other three votes are supposed to convey.

Seems like they might be SKEPTICAL, PUSHBACK, and crazy-talk FANTASYLAND of rainbows and unicorns.

But maybe they're supposed to be THOUGHT-PROVOKING, APPLAUSE, and MAGICALLY-DELICIOUS.

I dunno. I wish they had tooltips.

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

*Spams article with 🤔 *

I definitely use it when it makes me think, but I really like that is ambiguous. ;)

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hrishio profile image
Hrishi Mittal

damn, now I want it on comments!

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

No worries, that's in the works!

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abrandao profile image
Anderson Brandão

What means the horse and the and the hands?