About The New Forum Emoji Reactions - Just As Bad As The Old Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down Vote [Merged]

[Asum.4960]

16 minutes ago, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

Example, if you posted that "skyscale should be sold as gem store item", and instead of reading 7+ lines of every comment to understand if people agree or disagree with you, emojis play that part easily. You will get how many agree with you or disagree with you, it's not just for your benefit but for others having the same thoughts.

 

And there's gonna be explanations for it on the replies, those who "down voted" might read those comments and if they agree with they are gonna drop a like/thank emoji, this way people don't have to repeat it.

 

And there's always players repeating the same question every time, instead of browsing for it in forums and eventually people get tired of explaining it.

I agree on the positive feedback side - like the old GW2 forum which just had a "Thumbs up" and "Helpful". 

It solves that issue entirely already as people can just thumbs up the disagreement to another post they disagreed with, rather than having to add their own, cluttering the thread - without any of the downsides of degrading conversations and opening up trolling and harassment opportunities. 

 

A system that's redundant in function with opportunity for harm, is imo a bad system.

Edited August 30, 2022 by Asum.4960

[rune.9572]

I like how this forum censors "h‌o‌m‌o sapiens" to "kitten sapiens"

Edited August 30, 2022 by rune.9572

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

21 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

I agree on the positive feedback side - like the old GW2 forum which just had a "Thumbs up" and "Helpful". 

It solves that issue entirely already as people can just thumbs up the disagreement to another post they disagreed with, rather than having to add their own, cluttering the thread - without any of the downsides of degrading conversations and opening up trolling and harassment opportunities. 

 

A system that's redundant in function with opportunity for harm, is imo a bad system.

 

You people are seriously trying to be ignorant of the opposition factor, omfg. Why do you always brand it as harassment or trolling , why can't you people get over the fact that disagreement is part of an everyday life, its like you guys were never said "No" as a kid.

 

When a lot of people disagree with you and you don't like it,you can chose to ignore it or put on a strong case and ask for explanation, there's gonna be atleast a person who will get back to you.

 

When there only up votes, then you won't know if you're right or wrong, because there's not just for/against (black/white) on an opinion as I said before there shades of grey. You can in many posts that they get few upvotes but no down votes ,meaning some people agree with it, some don't have an opinion of it. So that post becomes an opinion for minority of players not the entire player base. And if you see a post with many down votes and less up votes, it becomes an opinion of a bigger player base. You won't know the difference if the down votes are removed.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

To see the folks here that are really that bothered by little icons in the corner of their comments....

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

1 minute ago, rune.9572 said:

I like how this forum censors "h‌o‌m‌o sapiens" to "kitten sapiens"

Well our ancestors are kittens, that's why Hindus belive we have 9 reincarnations. Hehe.

[Asum.4960]

10 minutes ago, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

 

You people are seriously trying to be ignorant of the opposition factor, omfg. Why do you always brand it as harassment or trolling , why can't you people get over the fact that disagreement is part of an everyday life, its like you guys were never said "No" as a kid.

 

When a lot of people disagree with you and you don't like it,you can chose to ignore it or put on a strong case and ask for explanation, there's gonna be atleast a person who will get back to you.

 

When there only up votes, then you won't know if you're right or wrong, because there's not just for/against (black/white) on an opinion as I said before there shades of grey. You can in many posts that they get few upvotes but no down votes ,meaning some people agree with it, some don't have an opinion of it. So that post becomes an opinion for minority of players not the entire player base. And if you see a post with many down votes and less up votes, it becomes an opinion of a bigger player base. You won't know the difference if the down votes are removed.

You really a projecting a lot onto me here/trying to put me into some strawman default opposition box for simply disagreeing. 

As I stated above, disagreement imo holds no value without the what someone disagrees with and for which reasons. That's all. 

I don't mind disagreement, nor am I bothered by the reaction system in a personal way. The only thing that bothers me about it is that it runs contrary to having an actual discussion, which is what a forum is for. 

I'm here because I enjoy (constructive) disagreement and the growth opportunity it represents. But if I make a post comprised out of 4 arguments about a topic and get nothing but a confused reaction in response.. okay, now what? 

What's the point, where does it lead? Why did the person disagree, and with what?

I'm not going to shout into the void asking for the anonymous person to explain their reaction as you suggest. The very point of communication and a forum is putting those reactions into words in the first place - otherwise why engage to begin with. 

A downvote is just "I disagree with you or what I think you represent in principle, but I'm either too lazy to or incapable of reasoning against your points" at best. That's not a productive feature to conversation. 

 

Who actually cares about weighing up up&downvotes to judge a post, rather than reading it and judging the content's themselves - and how is that healthy and valuable to begin with? 

Do you ever see a post with 3 Likes and 5 Confused in anonymous reactions of which you don't know the intent or reasoning and think, clearly this person is wrong and I don't need to read the post? 

 

The only point of such a system is to get a general idea of community sentiment - and just upvotes fulfil that function all the same. 

If person A argues one side and person B another, and person B generally receives vastly more upvotes for their posts in the argument than person A, that's enough to gauge community sentiment. How is that not enough of an "opposition factor" for you? What does the same or similar ratio in reverse of downvotes add?

 

Trying to brand people who aren't too keen on Emoji reactions substituting actual arguments as being ignorant about the very nature of disagreement, or being spoiled as children is a pretty silly reach. 

But I'm fine with agreeing to disagree here. As I said in post one, to each their own. 

[disco.9302]

12 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

As I stated above, disagreement imo holds no value without the what someone disagrees with and for which reasons. 

you're missing a major part of how this forum works.

Most people will understand which emoji relates to a positive or negative (agreement or disagreement) reaction. That's fine. 

However, many people do not want to read walls of text or (more importantly) the same argument or answer worded differently but repeated. For this reason, we can simply react appropriately with the initial statement (original post) and consequently react to other posts to agree/disagree. 

What would be the point of me repeating what several people have already said just worded differently? why type out my version when I can agree with another already there? it's not enriching the "debate"

[Tukaram.8256]

3 hours ago, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

because there's not just for/against (black/white) on an opinion as I said before there shades of grey.

Which is exactly why the emoji 'vote' is useless.  If you disagree - make a reply explaining your position (as you did in this thread).  A thumbs up or down or confused... is pretty useless without a reply. 😎

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

2 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

You really a projecting a lot onto me here/trying to put me into some strawman default opposition box for simply disagreeing. 

As I stated above, disagreement imo holds no value without the what someone disagrees with and for which reasons. That's all. 

I don't mind disagreement, nor am I bothered by the reaction system in a personal way. The only thing that bothers me about it is that it runs contrary to having an actual discussion, which is what a forum is for. 

I'm here because I enjoy (constructive) disagreement and the growth opportunity it represents. But if I make a post comprised out of 4 arguments about a topic and get nothing but a confused reaction in response.. okay, now what? 

What's the point, where does it lead? Why did the person disagree, and with what?

I'm not going to shout into the void asking for the anonymous person to explain their reaction as you suggest. The very point of communication and a forum is putting those reactions into words in the first place - otherwise why engage to begin with. 

A downvote is just "I disagree with you or what I think you represent in principle, but I'm either too lazy to or incapable of reasoning against your points" at best. That's not a productive feature to conversation. 

 

Who actually cares about weighing up up&downvotes to judge a post, rather than reading it and judging the content's themselves - and how is that healthy and valuable to begin with? 

Do you ever see a post with 3 Likes and 5 Confused in anonymous reactions of which you don't know the intent or reasoning and think, clearly this person is wrong and I don't need to read the post? 

 

The only point of such a system is to get a general idea of community sentiment - and just upvotes fulfil that function all the same. 

If person A argues one side and person B another, and person B generally receives vastly more upvotes for their posts in the argument than person A, that's enough to gauge community sentiment. How is that not enough of an "opposition factor" for you? What does the same or similar ratio in reverse of downvotes add?

 

Trying to brand people who aren't too keen on Emoji reactions substituting actual arguments as being ignorant about the very nature of disagreement, or being spoiled as children is a pretty silly reach. 

But I'm fine with agreeing to disagree here. As I said in post one, to each their own. 

 

Well when you put it like that I can understand your perspective and have to agree on few points and also disagree on few others.

 

I agree that in forums it's meant to have meaningful discussions rather than random emojis, I want that too since it would help all of us to understand why people disagree.

 

But I gotta disagree that we need to disregard emojis, like I said before it shows a metric of people who really care about your topic, if you removed them then the forum would look more dead since there will be views but not much replies. Atleast you would know if people agree/disagree. People do care about it, they don't always have time to go through each and every comment to see if people are actually ok or not ok with it.

 

And you're partially right on the part about a post having 2:3 on likes/dislikes, though I seen people not ignore it and I did the same too, can't say the same about comments tho.

 

P.s. my previous reply wasn't just meant for you but others who kept complaining about the doenvotes not the emojis itself.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

8 minutes ago, Tukaram.8256 said:

Which is exactly why the emoji 'vote' is useless.  If you disagree - make a reply explaining your position (as you did in this thread).  A thumbs up or down or confused... is pretty useless without a reply. 😎

Yeah that's exactly why I originally wrote this thread.

You can seriously post something that is 100% accurate with nothing arguable about it, and they know there is no argument to be made, nor do they have one, but because they just don't want to see the idea happen, or in many cases they want to defend their own class during "this is clearly OP threads" they just sign into a bunch of alts, and keep clicking confuse faces, to make it look like the statement is somehow wrong or dumb or that many people disagree.

The messed up thing is, it works. People are just trained to look at what appears to be "community votes" and 95% of them never stop to consider the kind of social deception that goes behind internet votes like this.

Alt account review bombing is a very very real thing, even in the professional world with movies and what not. You get a group of 10 or 20 super troll dedicated guys who REALLY want to try and stress some opinion, and those 10 to 20 people, due to websites allowing infinite creation of alt accounts, results in like 1000 to 2000 bad reviews instead of 10 to 20 bad reviews.

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

11 minutes ago, Tukaram.8256 said:

pretty useless

Not really, people will get to know how many people agree or disagree on a topic, they can keep reading the comments if they're interested in it or save time and leave.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

Just now, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

Not really, people will get to know how many people agree or disagree on a topic, they can keep reading the comments if they're interested in it or save time and leave.

Yes but most of the confuse face spam, in many cases during firey forum debates is a serious misrepresentation of how many people actually are disagreeing or confused, due to alt account spam.

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

1 minute ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

Yes but most of the confuse face spam, in many cases during firey forum debates is a serious misrepresentation of how many people actually are disagreeing or confused, due to alt account spam.

 

I have to see this as a baseless argument, mainly for the fact that there maybe people who are petty but not all of them are, especially in a gaming forum, which not many care much about.

 

I could also claim that you're all just the same person with different alts complaining about emojis, lol.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

They have changed something with the design, interesting. I really appreciate the information at the top of the thread, telling me who else is active in that thread by now.  In addition I get a notification when someone is typing while I am typing. Both are actually nice features. Now I am curious what else is different ^^.

-
Some people on this board take stuff personally. If you happen to step on somebody's toe, you can notice confused-reactions even on simple/peaceful posts for a couple of days.

In addition we have the faction-fights, where you pick a side. Allies get Thank You and Thumb Up, enemies get confused and cry. Hot topics where there are only two options.

I really miss our old board and the reaction system there. We had cool things like Helpful reactions, which you could also use to sort users content. We have a couple of writers where this was very informative. If there was a question or a problem, you only had to look out for the Helpful reactions to find the solutions.

Thank You is the new Helpful and is often rewarded for being offensive and humiliating in the above mentioned faction-fights. That is really annoying and reduced the quality of the board drastically (imo). 

I cannot turn the clock back. But I am comfortable with the Ignore/Block system on this board by now. It is quite easy to utilize and saved my mood plenty of times. If you notice someone who keeps grinding your gears over and over, just put them on the ignore list. I guarantee, you will feel better in no time.

I also tend to manipulate the reaction system sometimes. In a few threads, I collected confused-reactions on purpose, which was a lot of fun to watch. In other threads I make mini-polls. Sticking to the topic, giving the other users the option to make a decision with those reactions. I think there are more options to turn this weird system into something useful.

Edited August 30, 2022 by HnRkLnXqZ.1870

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

37 minutes ago, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

 

I have to see this as a baseless argument, mainly for the fact that there maybe people who are petty but not all of them are, especially in a gaming forum, which not many care much about.

 

I could also claim that you're all just the same person with different alts complaining about emojis, lol.

Saying this is a baseless argument is quite naive.

And yes, you could claim that, but we are also talking motives here and obvious evidences which often indicate when a person is spamming reactions on alts:

1. People who like to argue and win forum arguments are generally the type of players who actually care enough to do things like spam alt reactions or do things like review bomb a marvel movie on Rotten Tomatoes with 200 different alts because they REALLY CARE about something like "how this character looks compared to original comics". It is typically the whiners & complainers who care like this to take their time to negative bomb things from alt accounts like this. You'll notice that in general in these forums or any forum, positive feedback is far and in between compared to the amount of negative commentary. When a person is satisfied with something, they generally just don't complain and don't post anything at all. When a person is upset about something, anything at all, they drop posts left & right about it. It is RARE that a person takes their time to drop positive feedback on things like this and when they do, it's just one statement. When a person is being positive, they don't feel like they are "Defending Something" so they tend to not get manic, and these kinds of forum users do not spam positive things on alt accounts because they aren't in a mental state to feel defensive or in some kind of fight mode. It's the people in a fight mode who log into alts to spam emojis or review bomb. I have seen times when a person tries to upvote their own posts, but it is much more rare to see than a person who wants to spam downvotes on things they do not like. For example, a person can log into his alts and upvote his own post 10x, but then also downvote everyone else who disagrees with him 10x each. So you see, the amount of alt account downvoting is much higher in these debacles than alt account upvoting. And this is why I was explaining to you the misrepresentation of actual opinions in this forum votes. Right now, the new Marvel series She-Hulk is a perfect example of this. There is an entire community of people who are upset at this series and they are spending day after day, making alt accounts on Rotten Tomatoes, and review bombing this one show over and over and over. But do you see anyone caring enough to positively make alts to keep upvoting it? No, you don't. But it is proven that it is a small community of people who is doing this, who always do it on movie/series reviews. This is what people do with online vote systems. This is why I said in the OP post, just remove down votes. With down votes removed, the worst a person can do is just no upvote you, which removes a great deal of drama and toxicity.
2. When you say something that someone really disagrees with and they make that quite clear on their main account, showing frustration or some kind of insulting argument, you'll notice all of a sudden, the thread is hit with this string of accounts who have like 60 or less posts, no avatar even selected, making all these statements to support that main who is arguing with you. You also notice in your forum notifications, all of a sudden these 5-6 accounts that show up immediately in this 5 minute time frame to do this also all downvote you in a 5 minute time frame, lol. All accounts with like 60 or less posts man. I can't prove it, but patterns would indicate that this is just a lot of alt emjo bombing when it happens. I mean realistically you post something, anything, whehter people agree or disagree, and you get emoji responses or written responses, 1 every couple of hours or 1 a day, depending on how popular the thread is. but when you go 2 days and get no emoji or written responses, but then as soon as that one guy posts to disagree with you and insult you, then 10x more responses come in within 3 to 5 minutes on accounts with 60 or less posts with no avatars? Come on my dude. Believe what you want just pay attention man.

[Metaljaw.6437]

I'm a little miffed they merged posts. I was wondering how many confused reactions I could get in a week.

[Tukaram.8256]

5 hours ago, Metaljaw.6437 said:

I'm a little miffed they merged posts. I was wondering how many confused reactions I could get in a week.

Yeah, they merge the posts to get them out of the way.  They have made it clear before that they do not care about emoji and have no intention of changing them.  People rightly complain, but it will do no good. 😎

[Serephen.3420]

16 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

Saying this is a baseless argument is quite naive.

And yes, you could claim that, but we are also talking motives here and obvious evidences which often indicate when a person is spamming reactions on alts:

1. People who like to argue and win forum arguments are generally the type of players who actually care enough to do things like spam alt reactions or do things like review bomb a marvel movie on Rotten Tomatoes with 200 different alts because they REALLY CARE about something like "how this character looks compared to original comics". It is typically the whiners & complainers who care like this to take their time to negative bomb things from alt accounts like this. You'll notice that in general in these forums or any forum, positive feedback is far and in between compared to the amount of negative commentary. When a person is satisfied with something, they generally just don't complain and don't post anything at all. When a person is upset about something, anything at all, they drop posts left & right about it. It is RARE that a person takes their time to drop positive feedback on things like this and when they do, it's just one statement. When a person is being positive, they don't feel like they are "Defending Something" so they tend to not get manic, and these kinds of forum users do not spam positive things on alt accounts because they aren't in a mental state to feel defensive or in some kind of fight mode. It's the people in a fight mode who log into alts to spam emojis or review bomb. I have seen times when a person tries to upvote their own posts, but it is much more rare to see than a person who wants to spam downvotes on things they do not like. For example, a person can log into his alts and upvote his own post 10x, but then also downvote everyone else who disagrees with him 10x each. So you see, the amount of alt account downvoting is much higher in these debacles than alt account upvoting. And this is why I was explaining to you the misrepresentation of actual opinions in this forum votes. Right now, the new Marvel series She-Hulk is a perfect example of this. There is an entire community of people who are upset at this series and they are spending day after day, making alt accounts on Rotten Tomatoes, and review bombing this one show over and over and over. But do you see anyone caring enough to positively make alts to keep upvoting it? No, you don't. But it is proven that it is a small community of people who is doing this, who always do it on movie/series reviews. This is what people do with online vote systems. This is why I said in the OP post, just remove down votes. With down votes removed, the worst a person can do is just no upvote you, which removes a great deal of drama and toxicity.
2. When you say something that someone really disagrees with and they make that quite clear on their main account, showing frustration or some kind of insulting argument, you'll notice all of a sudden, the thread is hit with this string of accounts who have like 60 or less posts, no avatar even selected, making all these statements to support that main who is arguing with you. You also notice in your forum notifications, all of a sudden these 5-6 accounts that show up immediately in this 5 minute time frame to do this also all downvote you in a 5 minute time frame, lol. All accounts with like 60 or less posts man. I can't prove it, but patterns would indicate that this is just a lot of alt emjo bombing when it happens. I mean realistically you post something, anything, whehter people agree or disagree, and you get emoji responses or written responses, 1 every couple of hours or 1 a day, depending on how popular the thread is. but when you go 2 days and get no emoji or written responses, but then as soon as that one guy posts to disagree with you and insult you, then 10x more responses come in within 3 to 5 minutes on accounts with 60 or less posts with no avatars? Come on my dude. Believe what you want just pay attention man.

Nah, I think you're the naive one here to think enough people would go through the lengths to do something clearly against TOS, and have much of a noticeable impact. I'd like to know how you can have irrefutable evidence this happens.

 

It's certainly not what I have witnessed on the forums. I can assure you most people reading the forums don't enjoy posting much, but usually just read and lurk on it and give a casual reaction based on their thoughts of what they read, if they could get through an entire wall of text. Sometimes there is little gained from writing a reply, especially when you're not a debating type. Some just wanna say yeah I like this idea, or I think this idea would be bad for the game or who knows maybe they are genuinely confused and don't understand the point of the post. 

 

I don't usually like to post much, but still do occasionally, usually when I want to add something to a suggestion etc. 

 

Usually I just scroll through and see what topics are about and maybe have a reaction here and there depending on my feelings on the matter. Especially when I don't have time to write out an essay of a reply which some seem to expect.

Edited August 31, 2022 by Serephen.3420

[Ray Koopa.2354]

You can do yourself a favor and

• untick reaction notifications in your forum settings at "Notification Settings > Mentions & My Content > Reactions", then
• add en-forum.guildwars2.com##.ipsPos_right.ipsReact to your custom Adblock rules

...and bam, enjoy a more civilized looking forum just as in old times with the dumb emojis gone. It may bug you at first not knowing what's going on with your post - but you won't notice anyway and quickly forget about this infantile attempt at communication. It's like blocking derailing players in the game. Just don't bother about it.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Ray Koopa.2354

[Ashen.2907]

I would love to see the OP's sources supporting his claim that the non positive emoji reactions are made by alt accounts. As far as I know only ANet employees would have access to this info. It is also odd that he doesnt seem to equate people agreeing with him to alt accounts. Seems a bit of a questionable bias to me. "people disagreeing with me are TOS abusing alt accounts but those that agree are not."

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

38 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I would love to see the OP's sources supporting his claim that the non positive emoji reactions are made by alt accounts. As far as I know only ANet employees would have access to this info. It is also odd that he doesnt seem to equate people agreeing with him to alt accounts. Seems a bit of a questionable bias to me. "people disagreeing with me are TOS abusing alt accounts but those that agree are not."

Where is your proof that they wouldn't?

Besides that, I already addressed this in my previous post.

[Ashen.2907]

2 minutes ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

Where is your proof that they wouldn't?

Besides that, I already addressed this in my previous post.

I didn't claim that they wouldn't. Proving a point that I did not make is not my responsibility.

I still have not seen any proof of the assertion you did make though. Opinion and speculation are not proof or even evidence.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

6 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I didn't claim that they wouldn't. Proving a point that I did not make is not my responsibility.

I still have not seen any proof of the assertion you did make though. Opinion and speculation are not proof or even evidence.

And I don't see any proof that they don't. Toss at me.

Rather I see a lot of proof, concerning times logged of when confused faces get spammed. When a person is hot to win an argument even when no one else is signed in watching "which we can now see at the top of the screen" you can see the main signed in who is arguing, and he logs off and in comes a plethora of alts that never post in this forum but only push emojis, it happens in a 2 minute time span, then they all immediately log off. It is common to not get any emoji responses after this from a single forum user that is not the main who was arguing or its obvious alts.

The feature to be able to see who is signed in and viewing threads is hard to argue with my friend. If you watch closely, you can see the same accounts always show up with the mains to support their arguments. The proof is right there in front of your face. Take some time to pay attention.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Except all the people that use the forum as invisible won't show up in your 'viewing' lists. 

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

21 minutes ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Except all the people that use the forum as invisible won't show up in your 'viewing' lists. 

Most of what you're seeing is likely people who are not signed into their account, viewers who are just reading the page but signed into the forum.

I don't think many people go out of their way to hide their status, but I could be wrong. Not sure why they'd care in a gaming forum.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Trevor Boyer.6524