This is definitely not an MVP feature proposal, it’s pretty controversial for most sites, but I think it’s important enough to ask.
If you don’t know what “reactions” are on Discord, check the “Reactify” section on this help topic https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/207619737-Adding-Emoji-Magic
Problem: Post votes can mean anything, having a high or low score may be people saying something about you post’s quality, phrasing, message, whether someone (dis)agrees with it, or wants it to have more/less visibility by gaming the system.
People leave votes and don’t leave comments to explain them. Votes are anonymous (almost, you can still figure out if you look deeply into users’ activity, at least on SE).
Voting is quick, it takes just a second. Commenting takes time and may be bothersome, or people don’t want to have their username near their passerby quick opinion, or they don’t want to clutter the comment section.
Proposal: Reactions. About as quick as clicking the arrow up or down, but each reaction expresses a specific response like:
- This is a high / low quality post;
- I (dis)agree with this message - and this can be combined with the “high/low quality” reaction;
- Funny - like on Steam, where reviews can be voted as “(un)helpful” and “funny”, it helps filter out funny but useless reviews;
- (un)important issue - can be used to gauge public interest in pinning/featuring a post, like on Meta or for Hot Network Questions;
Reactions don’t take up valuable comment space, and wouldn’t be cleared when “nuking” comment threads, which helps preserve public sentiment/opinion on the posts.
I don’t know whether it would be a good idea to make it public which users added each reaction to avoid chilling effects. Maybe show it only to moderators.
This feature might not be great for most sites, it might be only useful for Metas, or it might only be desired by specific communities. In either case, I think when an open-source Q&A base site appears, I’ll be implementing this feature for me and my community based on the feedback that we’d all very much like it for our little game and anime club.