[HN Gopher] Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by...
___________________________________________________________________
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a
postfix header
Author : wasmitnetzen
Score : 400 points
Date : 2024-07-16 16:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (neilzone.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (neilzone.co.uk)
| megous wrote:
| The reaction email doesn't have some specific header that can be
| used to block it?
| ppbjj wrote:
| That would be a pretty suboptimal user experience for both
| parties, don't you think?
| megous wrote:
| Depends on what you're optimizing for, how big of a problem
| not knowing whether someone read your email is to you
| specifically, and for what kinds of emails/senders this
| happens.
| projektfu wrote:
| The UX problem is you send an e-mail, and someone "thumbs up" a
| response, and then you block the response and assume that they
| didn't care to respond, while they think they have responded.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The distance between "didn't care to respond" and a thumbs up
| emoji response is measured in angstroms.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| With a thumbs-up I know they've read it, and that's worth
| quiet a bit in this asynchronous communication world of
| ours.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We used to (and I believe still) have Read Receipts for
| this.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| read receipts just mean you opened the message, not that
| you actually read it. It's a terrible misnomer.
| m3047 wrote:
| Yes! +1 And it's possible to disable Read Receipts and a
| lot of people do. A lot of people mangle beacon pixels
| too.
| xenophonf wrote:
| Oh yeah, the thing I always turn off or filter out
| because the last thing I need is another way spies and
| hackers and ad men can track every waking moment of my
| life.
| toyg wrote:
| Read Receipts are invasive, because they signal when I
| read it - which might well not be when I want to reply. I
| could read an email today and then decide I'll reply
| tomorrow or next Wednesday, because reasons; but the
| sender will see the read receipt and just assume I hate
| their guts for not replying immediately to the Most
| Important Person In The World (i.e. them).
|
| So I turn them off as a matter of routine on all my
| accounts.
| projektfu wrote:
| That was another groupware feature that was great for
| small orgs and terrible for the general net.
| projektfu wrote:
| I suppose it'd be OK if the other side of your TCP
| connections stopped sending ACKs.
| megous wrote:
| This is cute, but not how email communication works.
| There's no need for explicit answer to any email,
| otherwise people would never stop responding.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not how email communication works. There 's no need
| for explicit answer to any email_
|
| Obviously context dependent. For time-sensitive emails,
| it's common to follow up with a call if receipt isn't
| acknowledged.
| m3047 wrote:
| Be sure to CC everybody. /s No. The technology isn't
| built for this.
| projektfu wrote:
| I'm pretty sure a large number of e-mail conversations
| (i.e. not just announcements) end in one person saying,
| "OK", "Will do", "See you then", "I'm too busy, sorry" or
| some such response. It's very uncommon to send out an
| e-mail to someone and ask them to do something or
| consider something and then assume it has been received
| without acknowledgement.
| m3047 wrote:
| Email is used for a lot of things. It could be used as a
| message broker in batch processing systems. /s
| (Seriously, there are MIME types for that.)
|
| I'm being surrounded right now by examples in multiple
| domains where it is clear that the moral of the story is
| that one person taking an action is different than a
| company packaging that action up and selling it as a
| solution to a general problem. This seems to be a lesson
| which needs to be generally remembered, explored, and
| learned. Again.
|
| While one person responding "will do!" is appropriate
| 1:1, it is typically not appropriate to /reply all/ when
| doing it or to reply to a distribution list when doing
| it. I mean there are exceptions to everything: "Reply
| 'will do!' to this all-staff@ message or you're fired."
| But generally it's a meme, an anti-pattern (and there, I
| did it again).
|
| Many people have built autoreply systems for email to
| respond with helpful advice to frequent topics. (Happy to
| help, I've done it before.) Similarly email clients
| (MUAs) which have macro / scripting capabilities for
| filtering or replying are not new.
|
| What's new here? If it can be called new, it's that
| somebody provided that macro capability and linked it to
| an optional email header the sender can provide which
| enables / disables the ability to run macros in the
| client. In theory; or something. We (or at least I) don't
| know if it's possible to add your own macros.
|
| I imagine this comes with tools in the client or in alias
| management to manage "reply all" / "me too": in other
| words it might be possible for someone to disable macros
| when responding to messages sent to all-staff@. I expect
| other extensions which reach across boundaries of control
| to follow if this one floats, and that's why I consider
| it a shitshow.
| op00to wrote:
| "Please let me know if you were able to read this
| attachment."
|
| Really?
| megous wrote:
| ACK is required for TCP to work, reply is not for email.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| The distance between "not detectable" and "detectable" is
| vast and significant, no matter how minute the unit of
| measurement.
| megous wrote:
| No. When you block an email the sender will get a
| notification email from their mail server that their message
| was blocked. They will not assume anything for very long.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When you block an email the sender will get a
| notification email from their mail server that their
| message was blocked_
|
| And if that blocked message was a reaction I'd assume I can
| move on: they sent an email, I sent a response, they
| refused to accept it and then spammed me to boot.
| m3047 wrote:
| > and then spammed me to boot
|
| There is a misunderstanding about how this works and how
| email works:
|
| * Rejecting an email during the SMTP exchange results in
| the /sending/ server returning a response to the sender.
| This is NOT spam and it not under the control of the
| receiver.
|
| * Rejecting an email post-acceptance and sending a reply
| is called /blowback/ and is typically considered poor
| practice and a type of spam. (But not UCE.)
|
| * Adding a header to an outgoing message which causes the
| recipient's email server to possibly generate an email
| message to the recipient when they reply has nothing to
| do with the sender. The recipient's email provider is
| doing this, and the problem is you.
|
| Let's recapitulate:
|
| 1) You use Microsoft as an ESP.
|
| 2) Somebody sends you a message, received by your ESP
| with this header.
|
| 3) Your ESP takes an action based on this header which
| results in you receiving feedback.
|
| The whole thing is a shitshow, oblivious to
| externalities; but whatever.
| megous wrote:
| Nobody will spam you except your service provider. My
| mail server will just return error to your service
| provider when it tries to send email to it over SMTP.
| projektfu wrote:
| I agree, this is clearly worse, whether it's "your e-mail
| has been rejected" or "this server is not configured to
| accept 'reactions'", it's unnecessarily hostile to a user
| who probably doesn't understand that Microsoft has done
| something non-standard. And they will probably assume
| that you don't know what you're doing, because your
| e-mail doesn't work.
| Arnavion wrote:
| The reaction sender's Exchange server would see it and
| could decide to not display the rejection to the user,
| since the Exchange server knows it's "just" a reaction
| that was rejected.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's email server dependent. When my mailserver blocks
| emails, it just drops them onto the floor. The sender
| doesn't get any sort of notification.
| megous wrote:
| That's not blocking, then. You're just accepting the
| email and not doing anything with it. It's usually called
| "blackholing". It's less nice to the senders for obvious
| reasons.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's been called blocking for decades, but sure, we can
| call it whatever you like. From my point of view, it's
| blocking because it blocks the emails from reaching me.
| walrus01 wrote:
| If a person has something substantive to say to me they can
| put out the effort to type at least one human written full
| sentence in reply, either via a message platform like slack,
| signal, or replying to the email.
| Arnavion wrote:
| I just tested with an Exchange domain and nope, the reaction
| email has only standard headers and a bunch of x-ms- headers
| that are the same as for a regular email from that domain. In
| particular, it has an `x-ms-publictraffictype: Email` header
| that regular emails also have, and the envelope content-type
| and inner content-types are also identical
| (`multipart/alternative` and `text/plain; charset="us-ascii"` /
| `text/html; charset="us-ascii"` respectively).
| JohnFen wrote:
| Oh, this is good to know! I haven't encountered this issue
| personally yet, but maybe once I've updated my mailserver, I
| won't encounter it in the future.
|
| Now to figure out how to stop the same thing happening in SMS.
| cogthrow wrote:
| You'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have reactions
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| SMS is being replaced with RCS, which does have
| reactions...even Apple is adding RCS...
|
| Welcome to the future.
| JohnFen wrote:
| RCS is already here on Android, but I keep it disabled in
| order to avoid read receipts and typing indicators.
| bradboimler wrote:
| You can disable read receipts and typing indicators
| without disabling RCS
| JohnFen wrote:
| You can? That didn't used to be the case on my phone at
| all. Glad to hear they changed that.
| bradboimler wrote:
| I use Google Messages. I assumed that was what you were
| using too. Messages settings - RCS chats - Send read
| receipts and Show typing indicators.
| utensil4778 wrote:
| <iPhone user> reacted haha to your message
|
| <iPhone user> liked your message
| JohnFen wrote:
| If you're texting with an iOS user and they use a reaction,
| Apple "helpfully" forwards the reaction as text. Which is OK.
| What I don't like is that it also quotes the complete text
| that the person reacted to.
| isatty wrote:
| You can like a message a page up, for example, and you'll
| get a random "user liked your message" and be completely
| lost.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True. There's no solution to this that appeals to
| everyone. Personally, it wouldn't bother me at all to not
| know which message got "liked" (because "liking"
| something doesn't really say anything that important),
| but I can see how it could be important to others.
| X-Istence wrote:
| Android does this too. I am in several group chat's with
| Android users and their reactions are also sent the same
| way.
| callalex wrote:
| Liked "You'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have
| reactions".
|
| It's really the most clunky backfill that Apple chose, I
| suspect on purpose.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Every day a new form of cancer.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's truly exhausting how often I read a tech article and
| think, "Just when you think software couldn't get worse..."
| m463 wrote:
| What if every time users added a reaction to an email, they
| got "microsoft points" towards unlocking new reaction emojis?
|
| :)
|
| (gah, maybe it's dangerous to even joke about this)
| KTibow wrote:
| Don't tell the Bing team.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Imagine a poop emoji stamping on a human face, forever.
| thenickdude wrote:
| You'll absolutely love this one then:
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-
| ann...
| p51-remorse wrote:
| I kind of get why we don't like this in email, but for SMS and
| Slack I've thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They're a way to say "I
| received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further
| communication necessary".
|
| Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when
| saying "fine, no further comment". And then getting a
| notification from the other party acknowledging my
| acknowledgment... yuck.
| morder wrote:
| I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see
| reactions.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Genuine question: why?
| cogthrow wrote:
| Old Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
| Eggpants wrote:
| Young'in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go
| all emo.jpg
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Imagine thinking being generally sociable and polite is
| in any way, at all, a negative thing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This question is how we get opinionated software that
| slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it"
| should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a
| feature.
| fragmede wrote:
| feature of the software being software, sure, but when
| there's a human on the other side, it's different when
| it's within a small group context.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Perhaps it would be better to ask, how do you expect
| people to communicate to you those things that would be
| expressed as reactions?
| valcargo wrote:
| Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
| falcolas wrote:
| Ironically, since HN tends to dislike short content-less
| posts, which means quite often unless we have something
| more to say, we do not respond at all.
|
| That is, there is no ack signal.
| saagarjha wrote:
| lol
| valcargo wrote:
| I know of a few company cultures like this. You can count
| on people to take action where action is requested, and
| to take note where taking note is expected. Everything
| else is just noise, and employees tend to keep the noise
| level quite low.
| falcolas wrote:
| > You can count on people to take action where action is
| requested, and to take note where taking note is
| expected.
|
| Unfortunately, I work with humans and technology, both of
| whom are fallible. As such, reminders and prompts are
| occasionally required. Being able to tell if a message
| was received, read, and understood is a very useful
| signal.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A lot of email communication happens by this same rule.
|
| Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people
| that need to ack a message can just send one, and the
| client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not
| bothering anyone.
|
| But, of course, every client needs to know about that for
| it to work.
| viraptor wrote:
| Ok. (Followed by 20 other people responding with just
| "ok", filling the screen with spam)
| watwut wrote:
| I genuinely think that in this situation, you should do
| NOTHING instead of reaction. If the explicit ok is not
| needed, like on HN, then thumps up are not needed either.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's a contrived situation but does represent a more
| general set of conversations where the need for response
| may be more ambiguous. There's a space where
| acknowledgements and reactions are useful without
| breaking the flow of conversation.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Ok.
| umbra07 wrote:
| Ok
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Hacker News does have some reactions - upvote, downvote,
| flag.
| niij wrote:
| Ok
| Mashimo wrote:
| ok
| hengistbury wrote:
| Ok
| conductr wrote:
| When the medium is email, I'm not expecting a reaction as
| it's async communication method and if they want to react
| it's in a form of another email reply. Occasionally I
| need a confirmation or something and I ask for it in the
| email, if they just gave me a thumbs up it becomes
| uncertain if it's a confirmation because I've learned
| that some people thumbs up everything just to acknowledge
| it and I later find out they just want to signal they're
| online and on top of things but actually never read my
| message
| logicprog wrote:
| Except, by turning them off, you are therefore _forcing_
| people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your
| communication preferences because you have, by fiat,
| decided that you simply _don 't want to perceive_ the
| communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement
| with others about how you want to communicate with them
| as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it
| has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in
| which case it is very fair for someone to question your
| decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to
| change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick
| your head in the sand regarding one channel of
| communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more
| efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of
| communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important
| information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the
| point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them
| off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to
| come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me"
| to express the same reaction.
|
| Also, I think this philosophy that _all_ software must be
| infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim
| of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea
| of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that,
| and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it 's
| somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is
| the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source
| software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated
| piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to
| use and impossible to properly quality assure and
| impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful
| professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing,
| programming, etc) that will be the primary software used
| for decades by experienced and educated professionals who
| will want to optimize their workflow and who have the
| time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool,
| then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat
| apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people
| who want to communicate with you to adapt to your
| communication preferences because you have
|
| I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the
| reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to
| do anything differently.
|
| If it actually begins to interfere with communications
| too much, I can turn them back on.
|
| > it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or
| something
|
| For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that
| configuration options often make the difference between
| software being useful to me and not being useful to me.
| That's all.
| viraptor wrote:
| > All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's
| my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything
| differently.
|
| "Are we ok doing ...?"
|
| (People reacting with :+1:)
|
| Now you have to figure out if you're being ignored or
| people don't have an answer. You ask them again directly,
| which they may also simply react to.
|
| By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things
| differently for you.
| watwut wrote:
| For christ sake, if there is explicit question do not
| react with reaction only, but use words.
|
| Because, recipient does not know whether you are
| acknowledging that you read that question or answering it
| or what. Emoji reactions are ambiguous majority of the
| time. Which is fine when they are used to add emotions to
| the discussion, but not fine when you are actually
| communicating with it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, nobody I know would respond to such a question with
| a reaction (an emoji, yes, a reaction, no), so this is
| not an issue in my crowd. I suppose (and it's obvious now
| that I think about it) this depends on what the social
| norms are in your group.
|
| > By bothering them again, you are asking them to do
| things differently for you.
|
| To a trivial degree, sure. Why is it OK for others to ask
| me to do things differently in this regard and not for me
| to ask them to do things differently anyway?
|
| Social interaction always involves compromise and
| reasonable accommodations for others. In this sense, I
| ask people to do things differently for me every day, and
| they usually do. And others ask me to do things
| differently every day, and I usually do. It's part of the
| social negotiations that make societies work.
|
| I do feel the need to reiterate that I am not opposed to
| reactions generally. Only in email.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Some people pay per text message received. So, they have
| to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends
| to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because
| they are ultimately another text message which will cost
| money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their
| communication" well then I'm sorry, but their preference
| is my cost, so I don't think it's out of line to politely
| ask them not to.
|
| Ultimately, this is something that I'd rather be handled
| at the carrier layer: I should be able to have my phone
| reject a text message and not pay for / receive it.
|
| On the topic of configurability: Software should
| ultimately serve the end user. When a developer makes an
| undesirable (to a user) change to the software and
| provides the user no way to opt out of that change, it's
| serving the developer's interests, and it's doing a
| slightly worse job at serving the user.
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| What, pay for receiving messages? I have never seen that,
| not during roaming or even on IoT plans or completely
| free plans.
| p_l wrote:
| Was(is?) common in USA
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| How does that even work? What if I spam you from a free
| sms gateway / unlimited sms plan?
| p_l wrote:
| AFAIK it resulted in huge bill for the receiver, though I
| have no idea if certain services weren't billed
| differently (wouldn't surprise me if you could send text
| messages that were billed only on sender side, for extra)
| aembleton wrote:
| Maybe its different in other countries
| logicprog wrote:
| > So, they have to ask each and every one of their
| iMessage-using friends to please not send these
| ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another
| text message which will cost money. If that counts as
| "forcing others to adapt their communication
|
| No, it doesn't, because that's engaging in bilateral
| negotiation of how the communication will go with the
| others involved in it. Unilaterally disabling the
| feature, however, is different, and that is what I was
| criticizing.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum.
| Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to
| disregard reactions from other people, which is
| potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge
| your message and you will not be notified of that fact,
| or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any
| messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a
| question from the coworkers using the space. Which brings
| us back to, "Why?"
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Slack should add an option to disable reactions for
| people like this. However, since the sender is expecting
| their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the
| reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok
| emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so
| that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended
| recipient sees it.
| p51-remorse wrote:
| This is the worst possible outcome - now if I'm in a
| channel with someone who doesn't like reactions for
| unarticulated reasons, _I_ am subjected to these
| notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates
| reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this
| option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji
| like most other people.
|
| The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all
| these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter,
| because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather
| than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling
| us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just
| to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My
| proposal here would do just this, but require the sender
| to do nothing different than before.
| lkramer wrote:
| They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their
| text representation. It's can be misleading because the
| text representation sometimes diverge from what the user
| thinks the emoji means.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I have a strong feeling that the type of person who hates
| reactions is going to hate this even more, but maybe
| that's just me.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Honestly if someone were to send me a message that only
| required a simple acknowledgement, and that person
| hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that
| as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged.
| But I suspect what you're really wanting is typed
| acknowledgment?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I would probably just send the emote I would react with as
| a single-letter answer. If I have nothing to say beyond
| "thumbs up emoji" the fact that you don't like reactions
| doesn't, by virtue of your opinion, give me anything more
| interesting to say in return.
| mavhc wrote:
| I don't want my messages acknowledged, it's just The
| Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood
| it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know,
| otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say
| Thanks, you're paying me to do it
| latexr wrote:
| > I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't
| understand or agree, let me know
|
| You've replaced "read" in the first part with "agree" in
| the second, and those are not at all the same thing. I
| can't let you know that I haven't read your message.
|
| If a parent says to the other "hey, I'm running late, I
| need you to pick up Tiny Tim from school", an
| acknowledgement is paramount even if you read,
| understood, and agreed to the message.
|
| > it's just The Generals Problem.
|
| That problem is concerned with an unreliable
| communication channel, which does not apply to the
| situation.
| artinmg wrote:
| Although it seems the military metaphor of Two Generals'
| Problem which I assume you're referencing is incidental,
| it's ironic that in the actual military all communication
| from superior to subordinate must be acknowledged
| perfunctorily, at least in very disciplined services like
| the United States Marine Corps.
|
| For example, if a sergeant says to a private "It's a nice
| day outside.", the private is obliged to respond, even if
| the statement is rhetorical. This leads to perfunctory
| responses, in this case it would be "Aye aye sergeant",
| or "Aye sergeant", or more casually "Er" or "Kill".
| You're not obliged to agree, just to acknowledge. Pretty
| similar to tapback responses in messenger apps and
| emails.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| If this is a thing (never saw it in 20 years of active
| and reserve Navy service), it must be limited not just to
| the Marine Corps, but the ground side of the Corps, not
| the air side.
|
| Sure, there's norms around how you talk on the radio,
| standing watch on the bridge, on chat channels for
| command and control, etc. But the rest of the time, the
| rest of the military talks to each other more or less
| like normal people with the addition of acknowledging
| relative rank.
| artinmg wrote:
| Well there you go, I was ground side Marine Corps for
| four years. No comment from a superior can pass
| unacknowledged. Indeed we view the air wing as a place
| where standards are lax and you live an easier life.
| folmar wrote:
| Most of the time I would be fine with the plain old read
| receipt + no other mail stating protest. The reactions have
| too different set between clients to convey enough meaning
| for me.
| utensil4778 wrote:
| It should be entirely socially acceptable to respond to any
| trivial message with "ACKNOWLEDGED" a la Picard
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I agree. Also, if the message proposes any action, it should
| be appropriate to reply with "Make it so.".
| xenophonf wrote:
| BRB hacking "Engage!" into
| https://github.com/marketplace/actions/manual-workflow-
| appro...
| freitasm wrote:
| What is wrong with "Roger" and "Wilco"?
|
| These are shorter. And remind me of the voice chat program
| Roger Wilco too.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well 'ack' is even shorter, and the common form of
| 'ACKNOWLEDGED' for such use. I've seen & used both ack &
| wilco in a technical/software chat context.
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| I use this, though I find that many folks, including many
| technical folks, interpret it as an exclamation of
| distaste (as in, "agh! ach! ack!"), so it may pay to be
| judicious.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh interesting, I have come across that, but only one
| person (both uses it like that and misinterpreted it when
| we worked with people that ack'd, which of course I saw
| coming & could explain since I was accustomed to his use)
| - didn't realise that was common too. (I would use
| agh/argh/ugh for that personally, depending on precise
| feeling(!))
| fwip wrote:
| Cathy (from newspaper funny pages) would frequently use
| "ACK!" as an exclamation of distress/frustration.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| This must be why my wife asks if I'm okay (or if I saw a
| spider, etc) when I reply to her text messages with
| "ACK".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nothing. "Make it so." isn't "I'll make it so" (aka.
| wilco) - it's " _you_ make it so ". "I agree with your
| idea, so _you go make it happen_ ".
| Gormo wrote:
| Or space janitors.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Networking software engineers just say "ack".
| rtpg wrote:
| Well that's what the reactions are for, right? Because then
| we have this sort of division between acks (and other
| reactions really) vs "actual messages". Combine that with
| specific emojis in certain social/professional circles and
| you've got yourself an extra layer of nuance in an otherwise
| tricky-to-navigate space!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why do you need to respond at all? The phone tells you that
| the message has been delivered, and if you didn't ask a
| question or otherwise request a response why would there be
| any obligation to do so?
| hunter2_ wrote:
| A delivery receipt, an automatic read receipt, and a human
| ack are quite distinct. The first means the device will
| offer it to a user who eventually looks. The second means
| the device expects that the user saw it. The third means
| the user definitely saw and understood it.
|
| It's rarely obligatory (unless the sender literally
| requests an ack) but is more to offer a data point just in
| case it happens to be useful. In some cases it will
| definitely be useful, like to unblock something that can't
| proceed until the sender knows you've been briefed. For
| example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later than
| 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they
| message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually
| staying out late is blocked by my ack. Of course, this
| could just be turned into a yes/no question awaiting my
| answer, but that would be silly considering that I only say
| yes; they're not soliciting a decision from me, just
| acknowledgement.
| krisoft wrote:
| > For example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later
| than 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they
| message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually
| staying out late is blocked by my ack.
|
| Do you have an integration test for that in CI? That
| protocol sounds like the kind of thing which can break
| easily.
|
| If I as a kid would hear that instruction "can stay out
| later than 10pm any night if parent knows about it" I
| would assume notification is necessary, but I would not
| return home early just because my parent did not ack it.
| And if my parents complained about that I would find them
| unreasonable.
|
| Of course with your kids you might have been much more
| explicit about what you expect from them. Or who knows,
| maybe you are much more predictable in your response
| times than my parents were, so your kids might worry
| about you and call you if you don't respond anything.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I was just trying to come up with a scenario involving an
| obligatory ack (but not one in response to someone
| literally requesting a response every time), as a way of
| showing that while an ack is not typically obligatory,
| theoretically there could be a counter examples in the
| form of the ack-seeker twiddling their thumbs until ack,
| so to speak. I think you're right that these hypothetical
| kids would find it infuriating, and such protocol would
| work better if every ack-seeking message actually had a
| question ("11pm, ok?") making it explicit. It's just
| weird to pose a question if the answer is the same 100%
| of the time, and the only variable is timely receipt. How
| about this: "11pm, lmk" -- but the suffix is wasted
| keystrokes whatever it is.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree. I'm not anti-reactions. I'm anti-reactions in email.
| santoshalper wrote:
| I don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network
| where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like
| that outside onto the public internet is absurd.
| signal11 wrote:
| Gmail has had this feature since 2023:
| https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
| olyjohn wrote:
| You keep posting this over and over. So what? Is it
| supposed the be okay because Google does it too?
| signal11 wrote:
| > over and over
|
| I replied thrice because I was surprised to read
| commenters replies as if Outlook introduced a new
| unheard-of feature. Including an interop related question
| I thought about later, because I still can't understand
| why emojis involve loading images.
|
| I found the thread too late to develop a well researched
| post and so commented as I read. Sorry if it offends your
| sensibilities. But why are you policing how I comment?
| :-)
|
| Also, why Gmail is important: It's a fairly major email
| provider so it sort of matters when they deployed this.
| Two market majors having a feature usually implies others
| will follow suit -- eventually.
|
| > is it supposed to be okay
|
| This assumes so much. I'll turn this around. Why's it
| _not_ okay? I can't see any RFC that forbids this. It's
| not a feature I'm interested in but I think it's
| interesting that email is evolving to match what users
| are used to on Slack, Teams, WhatsApp etc. And (software)
| evolution is something I'm _very_ interested in.
| signal11 wrote:
| Gmail now has emoji reactions too. Eg see the smiley face here:
| https://imgur.com/a/0cYSLMQ
|
| They launched it last year[1].
|
| [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| My friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm
| there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was
| brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one
| gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to
| happen anyway.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| wilco
| not_kurt_godel wrote:
| Concur without comment.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| I usually shorten it to simply "I concur", if no comment
| follows, it is a given. Maybe if you are using a lossy
| message format where a potential comment might get left out
| it would be necessary to make that part clear, but for most
| things it is a given.
| pirates wrote:
| ack
| cmg wrote:
| Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With
| iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other
| people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you
| still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in
| certain group chats I'm in.
|
| Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message
| on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite
| when saying "fine, no further comment"._
|
| We've had macros on computers since at least the 1980's. Just
| pick your standard acknowledgement and bind it to a hotkey, or
| a text expansion.
|
| On macOS: Settings - Keyboard - Text Replacements...
| stratocumulus0 wrote:
| I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a
| capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed
| this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's
| not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling
| face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied
| by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did
| the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the
| UI.
| lilyball wrote:
| Perhaps the emails have both html and plain text
| representations, and you've configured your client to only show
| the plain text version?
| theamk wrote:
| you almost got it!
|
| This was likely winmail.dat/TNEF[0], Microsoft's proprietary
| replacement of HTML.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsula
| tio...
| adzm wrote:
| TNEF is a container/encapsulation format rather than a
| markup language. It can contain HTML as well as RTF and
| plain text.
|
| Granted HTML rendering of email is full of quirks in
| Outlook
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| It's using Word to render html. They tried using a
| browser engine but then it rendered a copy-pasted Word
| text differently and users hated that.
| unnah wrote:
| Now that they are transitioning the desktop version of
| Outlook into an Electron-like webview, I suppose showing
| HTML directly in the webview is out of the question, and
| they must be using the Javascript version of Word to
| render HTML...
| pjmlp wrote:
| And everyone on Microsoft ecosystem hates the new Outlook
| version.
|
| We already have the 365 Web version for that.
|
| Yet another example of Microsoft's failure to hire
| employees with native Windows development skills, now
| with the old guard that grew up with Win32 are reaching
| retirement age.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you ever though nobody had an use-case for WASM...
| easton wrote:
| Apparently it was the <font> tag in the emails (guess it had to
| be a HTML email):
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...
| NoPicklez wrote:
| So funny, my mother would send me emails from work and I would
| see J every now and then. First letter of my first name is J so
| I kept thinking she was just referring to me but she was
| sending a smiley face
| pinsl wrote:
| In had exactly the same experience when emailing my father.
| bitwize wrote:
| The conversion from emoticons to wingding J's occurred _at the
| server level_. I 've sent emails in Mutt through an exchange
| server that, when quoted back to me, had the ASCII smileys
| converted to J's.
|
| Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's
| wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some
| Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of
| emails sent through them.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Haha I too was confused about this J character for a long time
| and took it for some corporate thing when I first started out
| on a full time corporate job.
|
| Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in
| outlook.
| raspyberr wrote:
| This is exactly the sort of thing that unix old timers would have
| done. Funny its getting disliked cause it's microsoft
| snapcaster wrote:
| Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful
| about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make
| the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see
| what the problem is
| JohnFen wrote:
| In email, it would just be an annoyance that bulks out the
| inbox. Not a huge deal, but filtering them out would improve
| the experience.
|
| Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication
| where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity
| is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't
| really add anything.
| xenophonf wrote:
| It isn't materially different than replying "OK" in that both a
| thumb's-up notification and an "OK" reply both act as
| distractions from whatever meaningful activity I'm engaging in,
| the same with all the DINGS and BUZZES and BANNERS and POP UPS
| that vie for my precious attention.
|
| I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and
| it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on
| filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It
| sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be.
| Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value.
|
| /rant
| p51-remorse wrote:
| This is actually something I like about Slack's
| implementation: reactions don't generate notifications.
| yoyoyo1122 wrote:
| You can disable reaction notifications in Teams too but
| it's not the default option.
| whyoh wrote:
| I, just like the blog author, disable remote images in emails.
| So I wouldn't get the "intended experience" anyway. Actually,
| does anyone besides Outlook users get the intended experience
| here?
|
| Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the
| standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
|
| So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being
| against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which
| then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
| signal11 wrote:
| I wonder if Gmail and Outlook interop on Emoji Reactions.
|
| Gmail launched the feature in 2023[1].
|
| I've personally not used the feature but emojis shouldn't be
| images -- they are after all Unicode code points. Not sure
| why MS's implementation uses images at all.
|
| [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or
| the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
|
| Another old dog refusing to learn a new trick. If you want to
| talk about not part of email culture, let's not forget images
| weren't part of the original. So people got over that. They
| embraced it just like they embraced HTML emails and
| everything else. You can stand in the middle of the stream,
| but it's just going to go right on by you
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not everyone embraced it.
|
| I still use a plain-text email client.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| In case you haven't realized, you're the odd one out,
| today, in 2024. I don't mean this in a negative way - I
| just mean that you're out of what's usual.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I always wonder about these "you're in the minority"
| responses. Why is that an important point? Also, pretty
| much everybody on HN is "in the minority". We're a pretty
| narrow demographic compared to the general population.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sometimes, in the echo chambers on the interwebs, some
| people might not actually realize they are the minority
| JohnFen wrote:
| Of course, but very often that's irrelevant. If someone
| is expressing their opinion about something, it doesn't
| matter at all whether or not that opinion is in the
| minority. It's still their opinion and as such, is as
| valid as any other opinion. To reply to someone
| expressing their opinion with "but you're in the
| minority" is just a way of saying "but what you think is
| meaningless". Which is both overly dismissive and untrue.
|
| If someone is saying "I think this, and therefore
| everyone thinks this", then how common their opinion is
| becomes relevant.
| nocman wrote:
| Do you genuinely think the GP needs you to point that out
| to them?
|
| I can't think of a single person I know that uses a text-
| only email client (and yes, I know more than one of them)
| who isn't what you'd call a "power user".
|
| All of them _know_ that most people don 't use a plain-
| text email client, they just prefer to use one
| themselves.
| 9dev wrote:
| Right. There's no point for those ,,power users" to talk
| about some obtuse email culture then, if they're
| evidently not a part of that culture in the first place,
| but just referring to their particular pet peeve niche.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Emacs?
| Mashimo wrote:
| Reactions was also not part of the chat culture a decade
| back.
|
| At least I don't remember anything similar in IRC or ICQ.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Most corporate users are Outlook users - looking at the stats
| for some of our customers, most of their messages go straight
| back to Exchange instead of any other e-mail host
| rkagerer wrote:
| I value my attention. I don't spent it on artificially
| generated responses. If someone wants to communicate with me I
| insist they put in some minimum level of effort. Before email,
| it took work to write a letter, which helped weed out low
| signal-to-noise communiques. Messages the likes of spam, LLM-
| generated content, and reactions go straight to my trash
| folder. I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking
| discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making
| me look at and hit delete on their message.
|
| It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a
| day and it's a necessary filter.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _I don 't spent it on artificially generated responses_"
|
| This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person
| looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a
| nod and a thumbs-up.
|
| > " _I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking
| discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by
| making me look at and hit delete on their message._ "
|
| If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or
| "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time
| looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem,
| this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email
| like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's
| nice).
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Personally, reactions serve as a fast signal for
| "acknowledged" that spares me having to see a new email that
| says "Ok".
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think read receipts may be a better solution for what
| most people seem to use the reaction buttons for. Then
| again, I don't really care either way. I can see the value
| of email reactions, but that does require clients to build
| in support for the standard.
|
| The text fallback also isn't great, I'd much rather they'd
| sendan email with nothing but the emoji than "person X
| reacted to your message". I suppose this is more corporate-
| compliant?
| setopt wrote:
| The problem with read receipts is that (1) it's useful
| for spammers to see that their email went through, and
| (2) I don't want to automatically share with people when
| I read the email or instant message, so i would turn off
| the feature even if spam wasn't an issue.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| You prefer an automatically generated read receipt that
| basically means "this person clicked somewhere in their
| client, it happened to open the email, maybe they read
| it, maybe it was an accident" to "this person read your
| email and consciously decided to acknowledge it and chose
| a particular 'reaction' to hint at what they mean"?
| Really?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm not a big user of outlook, but I use
| reactions a lot in chat.
|
| I like receiving reactions specifically because they save me
| time. When I get a typed message, I often take time to think
| through whether the sender is expecting some sort of
| acknowledgement (confirming that I got their message letting
| me know that I'm welcome to thank them again any time!) or
| whether it's polite to terminate the exchange by not
| responding. Overall, I spend far more time than I'd like
| second-guessing my words. When I just get a reaction, it
| serves as a form of acknowledgement that doesn't demand
| further response and frees me from an obligation.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| Geez. You complain about disrespect, and then you explain you
| want everyone to cater to your particular requirements and
| waste their own time (instead of using the feature designed
| to save everyone's time) because you... "value your
| attention"?
| akira2501 wrote:
| I like using them but I hate that they leave the "campus"
| automatically.
| lvturner wrote:
| Agreed - I find it a very nice way to effectively send a
| "Thanks" email internally without cluttering the recipient's
| inbox with "Thanks" emails... but this only makes sense to me
| for internal mails/workflows.
| conductr wrote:
| It's usually unnecessary and triggers notifications stealing my
| attention. If I silence them I might miss some actual change in
| conversation status. (Eg. Someone asks a question and the
| answer is in the form of a thumbs down reaction, if
| notifications are off I am unwittingly waiting for the answer
| until I check the conversation again)
|
| Usually on multiple devices. That said, they are fine when on
| certain mediums. Chat and slack type stuff where it's sync
| conversations that's fine (although on larger groups and at
| work it starts becoming an asynchronous bulletin board more
| than a chat). Email is asynchronous and I only need the final
| response if the conversation even requires one. If I'm asking
| you a question I don't need an acknowledgment reaction followed
| by an answer 3 hours later. Just send the answer 3 hours later.
| If I asked you a question and said I needed an answer quickly,
| you could say I can't get it to you for 3 hours or if you never
| say anything I'm going to assume you won't be answering me
| (that's ok!) but if you acknowledge it I will assume you're
| working on the quick response I asked for and if o don't get it
| I'll probably be upset or wondering what the problem is.
|
| Anyways, in general we've built up a lot of norms for various
| mediums. Email norms don't need to follow chat norms.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Two issues: It's not a standard, Microsoft just did this with
| the assumption that most people are using Outlook anyway. They
| didn't care how this would work for everyone else.
|
| Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can
| I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with
| something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If
| we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious
| business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and
| precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they
| are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context,
| culture or mood or the recipient.
|
| There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions"
| in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and
| made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers
| came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's
| how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I
| feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to
| show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers
| have all the hallmarks of a hack.
| lkramer wrote:
| I am not anti reaction as such, especially when it's just a
| thumbs up, although I very seldom use it myself.
|
| However I really struggle with emojis as a general concept. I
| don't understand a lot of them, and it seems people put a lot
| of hidden meaning into them that I have to interpret, and I
| feel the cognitive load is a lot bigger than if people would
| just type out what the fuck they are trying to say.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that the issue with emojis is that they're a kind of
| slang. Because of that, what they mean, exactly, is very
| dependent on the social circle they exist in.
|
| When my friends use emojis, I know what they mean because I
| know them and the in-group slang we use. When a stranger or
| acquaintance uses emojis, the only way to know what they're
| trying to say is through context clues, like with any other
| unfamiliar slang.
|
| So if someone I don't know well is using emojis, I just
| ignore the ones whose meaning aren't obvious given the
| context. If I think they're trying to say something
| important, I'll ask outright what they meant (and then get an
| understanding of how they use emojis and so are better able
| to understand them in the future.)
| frumiousirc wrote:
| It isn't distasteful, it is harmful.
|
| I asked a question recently to someone and got a "like" back as
| the "answer". I then spent one minute pondering wtf this
| message even was (it was the first of its kind that I received)
| and another pondering wtf the respondent meant as the question
| was not of the form "do you like XXX?".
|
| This "feature", at least in this case, was not a form of
| communication of but a disruptive form of confusion.
|
| This "feature" is not just distasteful but actively harmful and
| anti to accepted email communication norms. On Slack it's
| annoying enough but it's a norm so it is merely distasteful.
|
| In email, I see it as yet another EEE method from Microsoft.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I guess i fail to see how your example is different from
| someone responding with "K" or some other equally unhelpful
| non-reaction response
| Gormo wrote:
| "K" is usually a short form of "okay", which is either an
| affirmative response to a yes/no question, or an
| acknowledgment of receiving an informmational message,
| depending on context. In most cases, this is a useful
| response.
|
| Asking a question and getting "I like your question" as the
| sole response is incredibly obnoxious.
| 9dev wrote:
| Are you seriously telling me you're interpreting a thumb
| up emoji as a literal _I like X_ , instead of applying a
| little common sense and infer that they probably meant to
| say ,,okay" with that?
| mihaaly wrote:
| Not anti-reaction, but against instant message style reaction
| in email! Don't smear in what is not there, it was not about
| abolishing reactions from the universe, those have their place
| still! Like bicycle bells go with your bicycle not with a
| horse.
| lupusreal wrote:
| If you can't be assed to actually write something out, then why
| should anybody else think your reaction worthy of their time?
| If it wasn't worth anything to you, then it isn't worth
| anything to me.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort
| to type is seen as disrespectful?
|
| No, it's exactly the opposite. "Reaction" responses are
| irrelevant noise that clogs up the communication channel and
| wastes other people's time and attention.
|
| People don't usually manually type these sorts of reactions
| because doing so is not often worth the effort. But this
| feature eliminates the friction, and encourages people to
| engage in behavior that is effectively spamming.
| whyoh wrote:
| This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have,
| where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's
| contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the
| SSID name.
| https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens...
|
| It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just
| one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.
| karaterobot wrote:
| From that article:
|
| > (So if you want to opt out of Google Maps and Wi-Fi Sense at
| the same time, you must change your SSID of, say, myhouse to
| myhouse_optout_nomap. Technology is great.)
|
| I knew about the Google Maps thing, I didn't know about this.
| That kind of stuff is so presumptuous and user hostile it's
| outrageous.
| kazinator wrote:
| Would it be better to have an op-out database, where you have
| to log in with a Google account, and prove that you own the
| device somehow using geolocation?
|
| The system has to be resistant against bad actors taking
| someone else off the map who chooses to opt in.
|
| It would be better if the syntax were simpler, like changing
| myhouse to __myhouse (double underscore == private
| identifier).
|
| By setting SSID a certain way, you simultaneously show your
| intent to opt out and prove that you're the operator.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| This assumes such a database is necessary in this first
| place, which in my mind would require serious justification
| to prove, given that it creates a situation where the
| customer's security is degraded by default.
| kelnos wrote:
| I do wonder how much it actually does improve location
| accuracy on phones. Certainly if you have no GPS signal
| at all it'll give you something rather than nothing, but
| if you do have GPS, does it really improve things?
| zinekeller wrote:
| If you are in an urban area (especially at the time it
| was introduced), it will _really_ improve things, mainly
| because GPS* signal reflections in urban areas disrupt
| proper positioning. It won 't put you into another
| continent but it tends to be around two magnitudes worse,
| especially when you're moving (from ~1 meter to ~100
| meters). The fact that multi-band GPS is now common does
| reduce this problem, but this is still helpful in dense
| areas with high skyscrapers that can still attenuate
| _both_ bands.
|
| * I'm using GPS here as shorthand for all GNSS systems
| (including GLONASS and Galileo).
| plorg wrote:
| At my workplace it used to identify my location as
| various places within a 300 mile radius of my actual
| location correlating (at best) to places where our ISP
| had a footprint, but sometimes even places that it
| didn't. In any case I had never connected to to our WiFi
| with my phone, so it would have to be correlating the IPs
| of users who had. I eventually found a place where you
| could submit location services corrections to Google and
| now it gets within 100 feet of the building.
|
| We used to joke about making a digital sign above our
| office door saying "Welcome to ___" which would use the
| location returned by the Google AGPS service.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Ever since "private relay" became available on my iphone
| (which I don't disable even when at home), whenever I get
| on google maps on my PC (so not going through the private
| relay) google maps always shows me in random cities
| hundreds of miles away.
|
| Maybe this has been useful when introduced, but I'm not
| convinced it still is the case.
| izacus wrote:
| Without it, your phone's location services would be next
| to useless in any kind of more urban area (next to
| useless = you'd have to wait for minutes for the phone to
| get a fix and burn a lot of battery in the process). It
| would not function inside a lot of buildings _at all_.
|
| People HATE HATE HATE and complain loudly at their phones
| if they fall back to pure A-GNSS positioning.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > Would it be better to have an op-out database
|
| The "_optout_nomap" postfix atleast gives a veneer of
| privacy that your SSID doesn't need to be sent by every
| nearby device to a backend service to see if it's in the
| opt-out database and logged/read by some government
| backfeed etc.
| exe34 wrote:
| no it would be great if you had to prove you own the device
| to opt-in.
| kazinator wrote:
| After the most massive awareness campaign you can imagine
| to get people to know about this at all, the opt-in rate
| would likely be < 0.00000001%. Cash-like incentives would
| be required. Likely, router manufactures would have to be
| bribed to promote that to the users, and have some opt-in
| screen in the router firmware.
| exe34 wrote:
| oh no, that's sad. anyway.
| kazinator wrote:
| Anyway, they are just going to help themselves to the
| SSIDs that Wi-Fi routers publicly advertise.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Would it be better to have an op-out database, where you
| have to log in with a Google account, and prove that you
| own the device somehow using geolocation?
|
| Why not the same thing, but opt-in rather than opt-out?
| rbut wrote:
| Yep. My WiFi has had _optout_nomap ever since it was
| introduced. People always ask me why and I've never seen
| another SSID with it included.
| maeil wrote:
| Come over to my place and we can possibly be the first
| people ever to bond over their home wifi SSIDs ;)
| lostlogin wrote:
| My Unifi setup has whitelisted devices. Everything else
| is completely crippled on the WiFi.
|
| I'm happy for how easy it is to do this.
| SpaceNugget wrote:
| Google maps doesn't need to be able to connect to your
| wifi in order to use it for location detection. i.e. You
| still need to add _nomap to the ssid.
| wil421 wrote:
| Google maps cars go around scanning WiFi SSIDs so they
| can map them to geolocations.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I really miss the days when people put time and thought
| in to their SSIDs instead of using the defaults
| coremoff wrote:
| There's a certain comfort, and security, from the
| anonymity afforded by randomly generated SSIDs.
| prmoustache wrote:
| On of my neighbors SSID used to be some bad words towards
| people working in IT. I think he got some bad experience
| with his ISP support.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Mine is "go fuck yourself" so whenever anyone asks what
| my wifi is, it results in a hilarious exchange.
| Aachen wrote:
| And the password is either "figure it out for yourself",
| "check the packaging", "try 123456 backwards", or "I
| don't know"?
| bluGill wrote:
| My parents were 'CIA moble survalance unit'.
| Aachen wrote:
| I saw a _nomap once! Mentioned it to those around me and
| nobody knew what it was of course. Must admit I didn't know
| of optout until now either
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| Be thankful that this actually works. It wouldn't if both
| Microsoft and Google checked for the magic token at the end
| of the SSID string :-/
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I learned about this recently when I looked at using
| beacondb[1] as network geolocation provider.
|
| [1] https://beacondb.net/privacy/
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Opting out via ssid is pull the table cloth off at a wedding
| level absurd. Effectively this design is we saying we respect
| you so little that you might be able deactivate this feature if
| tattoo your choice on your face but we might might ignore that
| too because fuck you for disagreeing.
|
| Iirc the same optout method is used opting out of WiFi
| scanning.
|
| Blanket behavior like this should always be opt in with
| explicit informed and uncoerced consent. A laughable
| proposition in this corporate world but a worthy aim
| nonetheless.
| somat wrote:
| You are not wrong and I agree with you that this sort of
| bullshit is laughably unacceptable.
|
| Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption. So I
| expect to keep seeing these sort of infernal acts as people
| get bright but misguided ideas that require broad adoption to
| work. for example googles wifi cataloging does not work at
| all if to get cataloged you have to put "_cataloged" in your
| ssid.
| riiii wrote:
| > Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption
|
| Sharing your host's WiFi password with all your contacts
| should never get a wide adoption. It should never be an
| option anyway.
|
| It shows Microsoft's astonishing ignorance of security.
| dijit wrote:
| Well, actually Apple is doing something similar, and it's
| opt-in.
|
| If you have a contact, they are in their settings, and
| they're nearby _and_ they can see your wifi network, a
| prompt will appear on your phone which asks if you would
| like to share wifi credentials with them.
|
| There's some foolery going on to stop it popping up if
| you're using the device normally, like you have to be in
| settings or the home screen - or recently unlock your
| phone or something... But it's very explicitly: opt-in.
| verandaguy wrote:
| It's opt in _for the person with the option to share
| network credentials._
|
| It's not opt-in for the owner of the network, who should
| really have a say in the matter.
|
| I do use this feature from time to time, but it's
| typically on networks where either I'm the owner, or the
| owner's given me permission to share the creds.
|
| This also opens up an attack surface (which I got to
| experience firsthand on a burner device at DEF CON 31),
| where someone spoofs an Apple device requesting network
| creds. The attack itself involves spamming share requests
| and catching you off guard, causing you to hit OK, or you
| just hit OK out of notification fatigue.
| nlawalker wrote:
| > It's not opt-in for the owner of the network, who
| should really have a say in the matter.
|
| Why? It's literally just a shortcut for asking for the
| password from someone who already has it and then having
| it read it out loud or texted. If the owner of the
| network doesn't want that happening they need to explain
| that in either case.
| verandaguy wrote:
| It's a shortcut that deprives the network owner of
| agency. As the person running the network, should you not
| have some degree of control over who gets to join your
| network, be it fully open, fully closed, or anywhere in
| between?
| nlawalker wrote:
| > It's a shortcut that deprives the network owner of
| agency.
|
| It doesn't, they have exactly as much agency as they
| would if the shortcut didn't exist.
|
| > As the person running the network, should you not have
| some degree of control over who gets to join your
| network, be it fully open, fully closed, or anywhere in
| between?
|
| If you want more control than a shareable password
| provides, it's on you to implement something other than a
| shareable password. A feature that merely helps people
| share passwords doesn't change that.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| How does it change the network owners ability to decide
| who gets to join their network?
| kalleboo wrote:
| If you need control over who joins your network,
| implement 802.1x or a captive portal or something. If you
| just use a WPA key, people will always share them, you
| can't stop them, there are literally crowdsourced online
| databases of "free internet" WiFi keys
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| Use RADIUS then. If you told someone the password, they
| can share it
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| You have that control: allowlist individual devices
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| The guests could already simply tell each other the
| password
| fireflash38 wrote:
| It reminds me a bit of how Waze or Google Maps would end
| up using access roads as shortcuts with navigation. You
| let a couple of people use it because you know them. They
| might tell a few others. Then big tech just sees it as
| "other people use it, so I'll use it". And now you have
| no control over your road anymore.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > where someone spoofs an Apple device requesting network
| creds
|
| How does this work? Isn't there any verification done
| through iCloud or something? I don't expect my phone to
| know about all my contacts' iphone identifiers.
|
| I just tried this the other day with my cousin's wife
| whose phone number I don't have stored in my contacts and
| it didn't offer to share the wifi password until we both
| added each other's number.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption.
|
| Computers were opt in.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Until they weren't.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Yeah, widespread adoption will do that to things.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption.
|
| Too fucking bad for them. This opt-out bullshit for
| everything like this, marketing emails, etc. is bullshit.
| I'm sick of it.
| acka wrote:
| Don't forget the website cookie popup tomfoolery, where
| you must study each and every popup carefully lest you
| click the wrong button to opt out.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| ...and they NEVER remember your preferences, well except
| your shopping preferences which will stick to you across
| networks and devices.
| p_l wrote:
| Unfortunately, depending on country the same legal rules that
| make SSID mapping legal without any requirements for opt out
| are also rules that protect your freedom in other ways[1].
|
| The proper way would be to design the protocol so that the
| identification information is useless in addition to
| disabling SSID broadcast.
|
| That would of course mean that joining a device to network
| would be way harder unless you enabled at least network name
| broadcasting, which enables tracking again.
|
| [1] under polish law, majority [2] of uses of received
| broadcast/shared public medium signal, is automatically
| legal. The only provision of privacy is encryption of said
| signal, because it's treated like shouting the information in
| public space.
|
| Bypassing encryption is what turns it into unlawful violation
| of privacy.
|
| [2] for historical reasons there's a mess involving radio&TV
| tax which was supposed to be paid per receiver, a bit like UK
| TV license.
| wordofx wrote:
| This was a good feature. Thankfully it still exists in iOS.
| Just requires approval.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The iOS implementation of this feature is perfect.
| setopt wrote:
| It's cool but it's not perfect.
|
| I usually try to use this feature when traveling: either I
| or my wife will add the new Wi-Fi and share with the other.
| It works roughly 3/4 times, but the remaining 1/4 is
| infuriating because there's no button to manually start the
| sharing and no info about why it doesn't work.
|
| I would prefer a reliable button to AirDrop the Wi-Fi
| credentials instead of unreliable magic.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| No it isn't, it leaks data to Apple whether you opt in or
| not.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It isn't perfect if you are the wifi owner and people who
| have credentials then give it away to people you'd rather
| not give credentials.
| quesera wrote:
| It's still an improvement though.
|
| In the iOS way, your guest can share the creds privately
| to another person.
|
| In the normal way, your guest can share the creds
| verbally to another person, which might be overheard by
| other unintended listeners.
|
| I guess the ideal would be to allow the network owner
| (which would be determined by what method?) to share to
| guests with a flag set for no further sharing (and no
| viewing of credentials).
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It's still perfect, because guests can share passwords
| verbally or in writing too. Not supporting a digital
| password share just means the sharing will happen another
| way.
| lokar wrote:
| Tasteless describes pretty much every about Microsoft
| Iridescent_ wrote:
| This just reminds me of my theory of Microsoft's checklist-
| driven development: Some PM writes down some single-sentence
| description of a feature (e.g. "Share Wi-Fi passwords with
| contacts") and the developers just read the list and find the
| single least-effort way of implementing it. Once done, they can
| tick the item off the list and go home having done their job,
| although often in the most excruciatingly stupid way by
| damaging their users' experience. I do not see how else could
| M$ so often add features in a way that actively make their
| products worse to use.
| yason wrote:
| Because this is Microsoft we shall apply Gates' razor and
| must thus conclude that "never attribute to stupidity that
| which is adequately explained by malice".
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > Gates' razor and must thus conclude that "never attribute
| to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice
|
| I like this term, hopefully it enters dictionary. Stupidity
| doesn't buy yachts, vile malice does.
| donatj wrote:
| I believe you mean Hanlon's Razor?
| gryfft wrote:
| They've inverted it ironically to attribute malice to
| Microsoft. (Not undeservedly.)
| munch117 wrote:
| Please refrain from content-free meming on HN.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Can you elaborate why you would see Gates as a malicious
| actor?
| klabb3 wrote:
| Monopolistic actions are malicious, if you believe in
| free markets. Gates led the war against Netscape, for
| one. The setback to the industry and consumers was
| massive.
|
| Anti-market behavior is today completely normalized, so
| Gates is very much not alone. Malice is not an unusual
| phenomenon.
| quesera wrote:
| This is a difficult question to answer without knowing
| whether your Bill Gates context includes his years at
| Microsoft, or only as a philanthropist with sketchy
| friends.
|
| If the former, you'll need to present an argument that
| Microsoft did not hold back the entire industry for 20
| years with low quality products, severe user-hostility,
| and monopolistic practices.
|
| If the latter, you should read up about the 1980s and
| 1990s and early 2000s.
| philipov wrote:
| What you're thinking of is called Grey's Law: "Any
| sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable
| from Malice"
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is
| indistinguishable from Malice"
|
| OP didn't mistake anything, this would be a public office
| clerk and they don't have private jets nor yachts.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I'm stealing the term Checklist-driven development. Combined
| with Cha Bu Duo it explains so much of what I see on a daily
| basis...
| p_l wrote:
| I do wonder of is partially not caused by the fact that
| underneath, Outlook and Exchange aren't massively using SMTP
| or MIME, they use MAPI which is built around X.400 even if
| it's no longer available to run Exchange work external X.400
| connectivity.
|
| Take that background, and how MAPI essentially prioritises
| _internal_ email capabilities, and slowly a perfect storm for
| creation of such misfeatures emerges.
|
| Internally to a corporation, in Outlook/MAPI/Exchange way
| richer world, implementing such a feature is both simple and
| possibly easy more useful (less annoying emails to write when
| you want to just give a short reaction).
|
| But then you hit two confounding factors - systems outside of
| corporate Exchange server - so instead of using a richer
| messaging feature you make it into extra text message - and
| systemd outside the corporate, where your message now leaks
| out.
|
| This way you can start with reasonably well thought out user
| story, and end with crap like the way reactions work - and
| weird extra headers
| mgkimsal wrote:
| 2001(?) I got an email from a client and it said "Debbie
| would like to revoke the earlier email". Might not have
| said 'revoke' but something like that. And there were a lot
| of extra headers I hadn't seen before. After some
| questioning, I got that they'd just installed some Exchange
| server setup (or whatever the direct predecessor was?) and
| you could undo email. But the 'undo' was to send an email
| revoking the earlier one. MAPI/internal clients understood
| it; to external clients like me, it was just another email.
| I'm not sure they (the client) quite understood that they
| couldn't 'undo' emails to me, because they could do it just
| fine to everyone else (inside the company).
| mihaaly wrote:
| Lazy technical managers (incomplete specification) combined
| with lazy developers (does not improve specification) and
| task completion count based performance evaluation (implies
| atomic task allocation with strictly < 1w time estimation) is
| the devil, not Lucifer.
|
| And they are everywhere.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| This is why PM's are supposed to work with Business Analysts.
| Unfortunately, most companies do not have BA's because, you
| know, cost. And, most PM's are not technical and have no
| engineering background or experience.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Apple does it right: it shares only if you press the button and
| only with your own devices (the share prompt will show up if
| your other device is currently facing Wi-Fi password prompt and
| your current device knows the password)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name.
|
| Or banish machines running Microsoft software from the network.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Sure, Jan.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Holy crap that's amazingly bad!
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I haven't seen this type of messages. Where is it coming from?
| munchler wrote:
| Microsoft Outlook.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-micr...
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Good lord, IMO this has no place in a business environment
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Wait till you see the state of error messages today. Not
| far from this joke https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-
| woopsie
| bitwize wrote:
| "Or you can use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy
| from my former job
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is that what I'm supposed to tell to all those Outlook users?
| kazinator wrote:
| Or, you know, you could just turf all e-mails with those "reacted
| to your message" Subject: headers, and not use any MS specific
| headers in what you send.
|
| This reaction thing seems like a gift from Microsoft to spammers.
| E-mail recipients have a "like" button that instantly generates a
| reply, validating that the e-mail address is staffed.
| pavon wrote:
| Ugh that is stupid. Outlook/Exchange already add a bunch of
| custom headers - you'd think they could use those to opt-in
| clients that are known to support this feature instead of making
| the rest of the world opt-out. That approach would provide a
| better experience for both Outlook users (since they would always
| know who could actually receive their reactions) and non-Outlook
| users (who wouldn't have to put up with the annoying reaction
| spam).
| ffhhj wrote:
| Microsoft have made several oopsies in the past ignoring opt-
| outs, i.e. OneDrive.
| xyst wrote:
| Apple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as
| expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you
| were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get
| spammed with '{person} liked "{message}"'.
|
| In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some
| ridiculous chains of text.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to
| this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice
| number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the
| time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they
| revert to their SMS ways occasionally.
| justusthane wrote:
| RCS is finally coming to iOS though, so soon this should be
| resolved.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Not to Google Voice though, because Google loves nothing
| more than orphaning communications products.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| I no longer get those messages in the default SMS app on my
| Pixel 8. Either google or apple updated something, they now
| show as emojis on the original message as intended.
| skiman10 wrote:
| Google finally started parsing those in 2022[0].
|
| [0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-
| imessage-reac...
| airtonix wrote:
| On second thoughts (looks at Camelot), let's not go there. It's
| a silly place.
| lkramer wrote:
| This reminds of when Microsoft released a comic strip chat
| client for IRC. You would have these people popping into IRC
| channels with all kinds of metadata about their character. It
| was fine for them, but super annoying for everybody with a
| normal client.
|
| I guess it was designed to be used with MSN servers, but people
| used them to connect to the "regular" ones as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
| skibz wrote:
| > Microsoft Comic Chat installed a custom font, Comic Sans
| MS, that users could use in other applications and documents.
|
| We have finally found the root of all evil.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| As an Android user, I often wonder if Apple users realize how
| stupid their replies look to non-Apple users. I wonder if I
| should tell them or just move on.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Apple doesn't care what Android users think as long as the
| majority of Americans continue to think iPhone's are
| "premium" products, are willing to spend $1k to buy a new
| iPhone because they don't have a slot for an SD card so
| that's the only way to get more space, and genuinely believe
| YOU are the dumb one for buying an "inferior" Android phone.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| I am more concerned about Apples users than what Apple
| thinks. If Apple makes their users look silly, their users
| might start caring.
| kgermino wrote:
| Until (very) recently iOS users saw the same thing you did,
| e.g. the text describing the reaction instead of the reaction
| itself.
|
| The person sending the reaction sees it on the message like
| an iMessage, but everything in a non-iMessage group text
| (iOS, android, or other) gets sent the same "liked your
| message" text. Nowadays both Android and iOS parse those
| texts and apply the reaction as if it was sent normally, but
| that's a decent change
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, which used to mangle IRC
| messages to pass additional metadata.
| joelthelion wrote:
| In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They
| save tons of "great, thank you " emails.
|
| Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're
| genuinely thankful!
| rightbyte wrote:
| The UI to spot the 'reaction' is really bad though. I got a
| mail to my work Outlook which was some kind of daily digest
| with the thumbs up.
| setopt wrote:
| I'm not an Outlook user, and I really dislike the product.
|
| But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get
| someone's attention in large email threads with too many on CC
| would have been adopted by more mail clients.
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm a Linux user myself, but I've since given up on using a
| standalone email client, and just use the Outlook web
| interface...
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Thunderbird.
| graemep wrote:
| Why? Because of these reactions?
|
| I have never seen one myself.
| greggsy wrote:
| Something like an iMessage of mail.
|
| Surely there's an RFC for that right?
| Andrex wrote:
| I've always thought about just making a chat client app
| using email as the underlying standard. Strip out CSS and
| signatures (and funnel spam/marketing to a separate UI) and
| bam, you have possibly the most widely-interoperable chat
| client ever made.
|
| The ostensible "problem" with this would probably be "email
| is too slow for real-time chat!" But really, how much
| difference does a few seconds make? And modern
| connections/tech make me think that idea might have to be
| reevaluated anyways.
|
| It wouldn't be a business but I could see such an app
| becoming quite popular.
| raphman wrote:
| Something like https://delta.chat/ ? There was also a
| project/protocol called Chat-over-IMAP (COI):
| https://github.com/coi-dev/coi-specs
| wiktor-k wrote:
| > I've always thought about just making a chat client app
| using email as the underlying standard.
|
| I'm happy to report that this already exists:
| https://delta.chat/
| wiktor-k wrote:
| > Surely there's an RFC for that right?
|
| Indeed, there is:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078
|
| It's used by Delta Chat (IM over email).
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Reactions might make sense in that context because they
| probably shouldn't be using email for these kinds of exchanges.
|
| Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636536
| mrspuratic wrote:
| My mental model is Exchange is a really database, Outlook is
| a database client, and SMTP is bolted on the side. Things
| that make sense in the MS ecosystem map poorly onto
| SMTP/conventional email, but that doesn't stop them foisting
| it on everyone...
| mihaaly wrote:
| Make no faking sense still receiving those stupid internal
| emails that 'Your Colleague Joe reacted to your email', and
| then the reaction is a censored picture of course, because they
| protect your privacy in the most stupid way saving you from
| their own reaction picture too.
|
| They should use Teams then, MS is in the process implementing
| untold horror into that one (my unfortunate friend works there)
| where they could live out nighmarish feature dreams and leave
| the email for actual content. Or keep all emails inside the
| company - send out the pigeons! - for f's sake then if they
| insist emoji based infantile communication.
| teeray wrote:
| I literally had to set up a "Congratulations / Congrats" filter
| to auto-delete those emails because they were so frequent and
| numerous when various accomplishments across the org were
| announced. The party popper emoji at least makes that far more
| tolerable.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I read that as "party pooper" - I want _that_ as a reaction
| emoji.
| blitzar wrote:
| Have a few too many drinks at the christmas party and go
| for it.
| Arrath wrote:
| Last year the executives beat everyone to the punch: hard
| limit of two drinks max from the bar, and you couldn't
| bring anything in.
|
| Party: pooped.
| techdmn wrote:
| I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose.
| Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much
| less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly
| to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire
| org / company / world.
|
| Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the
| recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the
| whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is
| there some other social function at work here that I don't
| understand?
|
| Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual
| contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with
| "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly
| that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to
| whomever is being congratulated.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that
| don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's
| essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a
| kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative
| expectations everyone is operating under.
|
| Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure":
| specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in
| the workplace to keep things "professional" and
| streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You
| may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement
| is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper
| emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A
| Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant.
|
| You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would
| have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone
| knows.
|
| In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings,
| it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking
| here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where
| every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could
| pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone
| is going to say already as an email and it'd save however
| many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the
| meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite
| was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I
| realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a
| meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within
| that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of
| the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's
| to ensure that the power structure of the organization is
| functioning as expected.
| techdmn wrote:
| Well shit, I haven't been going to the all-hands either!
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I hadn't been for ages, and then my manager brought up my
| lack of attendance in my 1on1. I had a flash of insight
| that the point wasn't that I was missing an important
| communication channel (because that would have had
| obvious knock-on effects), but that there was a social
| issue at play, and that's what led to my view shifting to
| this social-fealty kinda vibe.
| zuppy wrote:
| because those are supposed to be visible to each recipient
| by design. outlook will just show the emoji inside the
| e-mail header, nothing more than that, not as a different
| email. unfortunately, as this is not a standard, for users
| of other email clients this will not work as expected.
| artisanspam wrote:
| That's the ideal but it's not what I've observed in practice.
| In my org, people send reactions _and_ reply all emails like
| this. It's just more distraction.
| pc86 wrote:
| Do people really reply to work emails with just "great, thank
| you" to the point where it would be distracting (e.g., many
| people on the email)?
| resonanttoe wrote:
| Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by
| producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat -
| IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add
| a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in
| normal IRC clients.
|
| All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users
| and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the
| time.
|
| (The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and
| networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling
| reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)
|
| Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works
| for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.
|
| Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up
| banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.
| davidgerard wrote:
| at least it gave us Jerkcity
| skrebbel wrote:
| To be frank I quite like this idea. Can't we standardize it
| somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback,
| that internally it's just a regular, human-readable email, is
| quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages
| than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it
| just always English? That'd be bad).
|
| I work on a chat component library (https://talkjs.com) and we
| support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed
| chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as
| chat messages in the conversation. It'd be very natural for us to
| add reaction support to the emails too, but I'd be reluctant to
| do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX
| (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.
| wiktor-k wrote:
| > To be frank I quite like this idea. Can't we standardize it
| somehow and add it to other email clients too?
|
| Just copying what I said in the other thread: there actually
| _is_ a standard for that already:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078
|
| Sadly, it seems it doesn't have broad adoption:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1724363
| eadmund wrote:
| Now if only there were a way to prevent iPhone users from sending
| reactions to my SMS messages!
| gadders wrote:
| I don't have strong feelings about this, but can someone please
| change the emoji palette in Teams? I feel like I'm typing in Club
| Penguin chat.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I wonder if tech nostalgia has reached the point where someone
| has built a Club Penguin chat clone.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Oh no, the truth is worse than I imagined:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-shuts-down-club-
| pengu...
| walthamstow wrote:
| Reminds of of the Chris Morris movie Four Lions, in which
| the would-be terrorists use a similar kids side called
| Puffin Party to coordinate.
| jwr wrote:
| It's pretty amazing how Microsoft has consistently been shitting
| all over E-mail for the last 30 years or so. I still remember how
| Outlook was introduced in the 90s and E-mail started going down
| the drain because of it.
| lopis wrote:
| This is the "extend" part of "EEE", where companies try to make
| it a nuisance to not use their products based on a standard tech
| stack.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| It was annoying when Apple did this with SMS. I haven't seen it
| yet in my workplace, maybe our admins found a way to turn it off?
| fourg wrote:
| Bless them
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or
| really anything that looks like an IRC room.
|
| Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it
| have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added
| it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat
| apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing
| should have the popular new thing, because that would be good
| for their career.
| usr1106 wrote:
| In our company we work a lot remotely and everyone is in chat
| when working hour. Emojis are used a lot. It's much less
| disturbing if _n_ people give a thumbs up to acknowledge a
| message instead of everyone typing a new message "OK".
| Especially when they read hours later.Also "working on it" is
| common if someone reports a problem.
|
| Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of
| chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous
| reactions.
| 9dev wrote:
| Same for us. If I write in the general channel that I will
| be five minutes late for the meeting, I don't need everyone
| to say, ,,okay, thanks for letting us know", a simple
| thumbs up from someone is enough to know at least one
| person has read this and will inform the rest, if
| necessary. And that goes for a lot of situations - I'm
| gonna deploy, looking at this bug now, just ping me if you
| need help... all of those messages don't warrant a full
| reply, just a short token of acknowledgement or
| appreciation is enough and doesn't force you to come up
| with a polite string of words that do the same thing, but
| more verbose.
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