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.
That is, there is no ack signal.
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.
Basically, the anti-reactions people are going to be angry no matter what, because the rest of the world isn't doing messaging the way they want.
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.
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.
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.
"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.