What happened to reactions?

Shampoo:

Negative reactions don’t really serve a purpose in my eyes as we can’t know your reasons for disagreeing

I disagree. Disagreement takes on two forms in forums: (1) disagreement is expressed , and (2) disagreement is communicated. Disagreement is expressed when you express the emotions tied to your disagreement (e.g., "Ew!, “Boo!”, “Ick!”), whereas it is communicated when you undertake a debate to explain why your disagreement is valid (e.g., “You are incorrect because X”, “I am correct because Y”).

I think it’s pretty clear that reactions serve a purpose. They allow disagreement to be expressed. Not everyone is a logical debate robot willing to partake in a debate to explain why they disagree with a post, nor should they be expected to. They need a way to vent out that very human frustration , which is where reactions come in. If you don’t allow reactions to serve that purpose, the forum will be cluttered with posts that express disagreement rather than communicate it. You can’t debate against expressions, let alone with them.

We see this in the world of sports. For example, some fans (group A) will express favorable sentiments towards the Dallas Cowboys (“Yay Cowboys!”) while other fans (group B) will express favorable sentiments towards the New York Jets (“Yay Jets!”). All group A and B can do to each other is express unfavorable sentiments towards the other team (“Boo Cowboys/Jets!”). There is no debate happening in practice. And in principle, no debate can happen. All that’s happening is people expressing their emotions.

Removing reactions will lead to a rise in expressive posts and therefore proportionately less communicative posts. A rise in expressive posts will lead to less debate, more tribalism, more shouting matches, more aggression, etc. And more importantly, people will begin to think that expression of disagreement is a communication of it, that it is debate, which leads to a snowball effect of more people posting in that expressive manner. More moderation would be needed to weed out those unhelpful posts. Larger workloads on moderators are never helpful.

Humans will be humans, and expressing emotions is part of being human. Having a system that acknowledges that expression is also important. It’s nice to imagine that everyone on the forum will participate communicatively rather than expressively, but that’s not ever going to happen because that’s not how humans work. It’s one thing if Discourse had never had such a function in their code base, but it’s another to have an instance runner actively disable it. No one has any obligation to undertake a debate; everyone should have the ability to express their emotions. In purely consequentalist terms, it’s a bad idea.

But whether it’s been actively disabled or not is still unknown, as communicated below

SYST3M_D3STR0YER:

Probably just some unexpected update just as last time with the „Share on X“ Button? Hopefully…