Reactions: Click to react

Feature Proposal
1

Instead of opening the view who reacted when clicking on reactions, react with the emoji in the reaction the user clicked on. Clicking on your own reaction removes it.

Other apps doing this: Telegram, Element (Matrix), Discord, Zulip, Slack, Github.

Possible contra arguments

  • accidental clicking on reactions while scrolling
    • if it happens, you can revert it easily with just a tap.
      • also you can wait some time after scrolling before allowing to react to make this case more unlikely or vibrate on reaction to make it obvious something happened.
  • Not being able to quickly see who reacted
    • Seeing who reacted is not very quick anyway:
      • so going in the context menu to open the dialog or long pressing on the emojis instead to open it would not be super bad. You can also not open the view who read your message by clicking on the double tick icon, so the additional step is not too bad.
      • Instead of numbers we could show the users avatars like Telegram does sometimes in smaller chats:
        image
3 Likes
2

I agree with this. As most other IMs have this behavior, having reactions on click will make us more consistent with others and thus better UX.

3

I’d like to add to contra arguments:

  • the status quo reduces group dynamics where a lot of people just jump on the reactions of someone else.
  • the status quo (probably) leads to overall less reactions, going more easy on the email ecosystem. This is especially helpful for users whose provider impose strong rate limits.
4

“most” is a little bit hard to define, “most” for you or for whom? We did an analysis of the current approaches of other applications and roughly could identify two different approaches (with Telegram having some sort of weird hybrid). We’ve decided for the approach of WhatsApp and Signal / the current approach is 100% taken from them.

I’m afraid there’s no “most” in this scenario. DeltaChat will unfortunately not make a difference here in helping with finding a standard among all messengers, as for whatever you will decide it will be “confusing” for one or the other user, depending on what they are used to the “most”

1 Like
5

I think this is a pro point, easier / more reaction is good in my view. rate limits are not really an issue and if you have that problem switch provider or do not react as much.

1 Like