Adding emojis to a misunderstanding

I recently had an idea: instead of having to write a comment every time the writer’s intent isn’t understood, we could simply add one of two emojis—:red_question_mark: for a complete lack of understanding, and :thinking: for partial misunderstanding or an unsuccessful attempt to grasp the meaning. What do you think?

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A zero-effort way to make a well-meaning person second guess their entire post and try to rephrase it to account for every possible cause of confusion they can imagine?

Sounds like a great tool for some people.

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I don’t think that’s helpful. First there is no notification if someone liked your post and considering the amount of likes, you rather not want to change that. Second, such simple icon won’t tell anything about what is unclear.

You might rather reply in private to the message or in the thread itself and explain what you don’t understand.

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אני חושב שכן כדאי מאחר ולרוב פוסט לא מובן אינו מובן לגמרי

I think this is a good idea in terms of making communication smoother and easier. However, I’m concerned that, in practice, it may end up functioning quite differently from what was originally intended.

Since this is a space made up of people from different regions and with different cultural backgrounds and sensibilities, I think it’s fairly common for the same emoji to be interpreted in different ways. (The popcorn emoji, in particular, comes to mind.)

Even the :thinking: emoji could simply be read as expressing curiosity, but it can also carry a fairly broad range of meanings, from “I’m curious” to something like “I’m suspicious of what you’re really up to”.

More importantly, when someone doesn’t fully understand something, I think it may be more helpful to let the author know specifically what they didn’t understand. That seems more likely to help clarify or correct the content, as well as provide useful feedback.

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Realise that this can be used very sarcastically, in a “Is everything alright at home?” way.

The emojis aren’t a particularly helpful feature for a technical forum, but they can help people channel their good vibes.

“?” could help us evolve from Facebook days.