I think the Rhino community could benefit from having reactions on Discourse, similar to how LinkedIn has multiple reaction types (not just a like/heart button).
As I was reading an insightful post from @eobet, I began thinking about how @pascal and other more customer-facing tech staff at McNeel say that they regularly read the feedback given on the forums and value the discussions happening here.
While I’m not challenging those statements, I do think it would build our confidence in the McNeel team for us laymen to be able to see which topics or replies staff have read and find interesting, hence my suggestion to enable reactions.
It’s a free plug-in officially supported by Discourse and since it acts as an add-on to the pre-existing likes feature on the forum, if you wanted to “remove the plugin, all likes will be preserved” (source) so I think it would be a quick and easy win for everyone.
Considering the designer/architect/craftsman/programmer demographic of our forum’s userbase, we could have emoji that cater more toward the types of reactions that posts here elicit.
For reference, LinkedIn have 6 reactions: like, celebrate, support, love, insightful and funny.
Eh I’m gonna stop you right there and say “Dear God No,” LinkedIn is the worst.
This is the official Rhino support medium. It’s their JOB to read every comment. It’s not their job to offer feedback on every comment implying some sort of official corporate endorsement.
Since we don’t have reactions, I guess I’ll take it into my own hands to react how I would if we did have them:
lol okay no but for real, could you elaborate as to why not?
That’s true, but I think it’s also equally true that it would be helpful for the McNeel team to gauge public response to a new feature or, say a decision to not take a feature forward, through these reactions, and thus have a better chance at releasing a product that appeals to their customer base. They get more/better feedback and we get to, well, react.
Okay, I hear you: you don’t want to the forum to start becoming chaotic and crap-filled like how social media platforms have become in recent years.
I’m with you on that; I can relate, especially as a gen-z member who has had to deal with all the distractions and noise that growing up in the age of the internet and tech addiction creates.
However, I don’t think implementing this feature would put the forum on a path toward become more like Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn, with infinite feeds, shorts, stories and other features that nobody asked for.
BambuLab also has the plug-in enabled on their Discourse forum but I wouldn’t say that their forum is approaching something akin to LinkedIn’s info-tainment platform.
I just think that having a more nuanced way to interact with posts without requiring a typed out reply would be helpful for users (new and old alike), and for McNeel to gauge interest and promote nuanced engagement.
I don’t care to write a one-liner “awesome work!” to every cool new project that I see posted in the Gallery (Rhino supports way too many talented people), but if I could react in a more nuanced way, I’d probably do that.
Sorry for the text wall. I didn’t expect such a strong negative response to a seemingly innocuous suggestion, so I thought it necessary to elaborate my point.
It’s probably generational. The “wall” part of “text wall” implies something big and hard that hurts if you run into it, so you avoid it at all costs - whereas I consider it information. The explanations you posted above cannot be put into an emoji.
It’s also a good exercise to try and gather your thoughts on a particular subject and organize them into a clear and concise post. For me that’s worth a thousand emojis.
It would actually be counter productive to the forum’s support mission for McNeel to offer anything but neutral acknowledgement via an objective response in the forum and actual changes in the product.
Anything else would influence users in one direction or another and color the flow of user input in ways that don’t help in the continuous improvement of McNeel products.
If the first lesson of the first day of any course about User Testing is “simply asking people what they think/want doesn’t work,” I can’t imagine how little credence one is supposed to give to detailed monitoring of reaction emojis.
