These are shorter. And remind me of the voice chat program Roger Wilco too.
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.
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.
They launched it last year[1].
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem isn't the acknowledgement, it's the additional steps I have to make to acknowledge the acknowledgement to the email system.
Eg Whatsapp has 1 tick for sent, 2 for received, and turns them blue for opened.
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.
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.
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.
When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.
In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.
This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?
When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.
Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.
In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.
Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.
Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.
Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
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…
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.