Yes.. it’s happening in this exact thread in fact
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
'Disagree'
- Thread starter Ctrlos
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes.. it’s happening in this exact thread in fact
I said this previously. There should be another emoji to signify a post is ridiculous, hyperbolic or absurd. The laughing reaction should stay and should increase reaction count. This new emoji should decrease reaction count.
Yeah, this makes me crazy too...
My bigger complaint though is that "Like" and "Disagree" are not opposites as suggested by thumb up and thumb down, and there's a strong mismatch in intensity between saturated red and pastel blue.
My bigger complaint though is that "Like" and "Disagree" are not opposites as suggested by thumb up and thumb down, and there's a strong mismatch in intensity between saturated red and pastel blue.
We don't need every thread to have a page one "Tim Apple doesn't know how to run a company" post... Personally I think those should be moderated out as trivial.
I'm sure others won't like the suggestion but the
accomplishes this without being too negative or antagonistic... IMHO anyway.Before that one, I would still like to see 🤔 added as a way to let someone know "I don't agree or disagree but your post has given me something to ponder".
Unfortunately we can't have an emoji response for everything.
With all due respect to the moderation team, the perpetuation of “Political News”, even after the closure of PRSI, parses (both by casual browsers and seasoned forum regulars) as a PRSI paean with the refrain, “PRSI, oh how we wish we could quit you.”
Do, of course, make corrections where this following analogy falters, but when framed within a less delicate context, the “Political News” forum, crawling along nearly three years after the end of PRSI, amounts to a making a forum presence not dissimilar from methadone treatment for heroin addiction.
“Political News” is small-P political — small, as it is a politics confined to news headlines — with the capital “RSI” dropped. Even so, the lines between P, R, and SI were fuzzy on the sunniest of days, and “Political News” as a sub-forum gives a nod to a zombie afterlife for the “P” in PRSI.
This is where one would want to be wrong with these stark analogies, as PRSI should never have been an opiate for anyone.
If, however, it was (and signs point to “yes, PRSI was every bit an opiate for some folks and a place to let them cut loose under its influence”), then the moderation team may want to add this discussion to their next huddle and, afterwards, proffer some formal clarity to the forum community around the raison d’être for a lingering “Political News” forum in the general prohibition around PRSI and PRSI-adjacent thread topics.
Cheers.
In the absence of a down-thumb reaction or even an “angry” reaction, a reaction of de facto silence — to not react — is itself its own meaningful reaction. It’s easy to forget.
This bears out frequently on threads wherein a user posts a question how to make something work or how to fix something on their Mac or iDevice. Through the span of the discussion thread, those posts which demonstrate themselves to be the most instructive, informative, and helpful to the original post’s question tend to be the replies which receive multiple thumbs-up (and other positive) reactions. Those which don’t tend to be less helpful, as assessed by the people reading the discussion.
The non-reaction-as-reaction is something worth thinking about.
This bears out frequently on threads wherein a user posts a question how to make something work or how to fix something on their Mac or iDevice. Through the span of the discussion thread, those posts which demonstrate themselves to be the most instructive, informative, and helpful to the original post’s question tend to be the replies which receive multiple thumbs-up (and other positive) reactions. Those which don’t tend to be less helpful, as assessed by the people reading the discussion.
The non-reaction-as-reaction is something worth thinking about.
I'm sure others won't like the suggestion but the
Before that one, I would still like to see 🤔 added as a way to let someone know "I don't agree or disagree but your post has given me something to ponder".
Unfortunately we can't have an emoji response for everything.
The inclusion of a dismissive reaction, like an eye-roll, lends to an enabling of mockery. When a myriad of people do so on a specific post, it amounts to the same kind of brigading community conduct endemic to the down-thumb reaction (on the aforementioned, problematic forum still using it).
An opinion you are entitled to. I disagree.
As @I7guy stated:
Used in these cases only, I'd be ok with
. The adults among us would hopefully use this theoretical emoji choice as intended and probably rarely. Of course, as I stated before, we have some children and fools amongst us that will misuse anything and everything. Thankfully they are the minority. I truly enjoy all the meaningless +1s I get from the fools that use the laughing emoji in an unintended way.
At this stage - and I write as someone who has actually worked as a political counsellor, political analyst in my professional life, and have taught politics at (an ancient) university, and am passionate about politics - I would welcome the abolition of this "Political News" section of the forum, as I cannot - for the life of me - understand what this is supposed to achieve within the wider context of the MR platform, not least as the original PRSI (which was adjudged to be too toxic, but which allowed genuine - if flawed - political discussion) is no longer with us as a part of this forum.
I can explain the difference between the two forum sections, as context for what PolNews is meant to achieve.
The original PRSI forum section was a place where users could start any discussion related to politics, religion, or social issues. The Political News forum section is specifically a place where the editors can place new stories they deem important, where there is a PRSI aspect they want to give users a chance to include in the discussion.
The difference is that one is solely user generated, the other is based on editorial decisions.
As to what it is meant to achieve:
Despite the fact that users as a whole were not able to stick to the rules in the PRSI forum section, the site owner and editors still wanted to give users a chance to continue to discuss the PRSI aspects of news stories.
What for? That would be a completely meaningless statistic - far too easy for a small group to manipulate, and it would totally disregard the reasoned, written responses - unless someone is going to go through and (subjectively) weight those.
100 "disagree"s don't make a factual post wrong and 100 likes can't make up for a single response correctly pointing out a fallacy.
MacRumors isn't a decision making site. Nobody has to "win" or "lose" a thread. Nobody is "disenfranchised" because they can't find time to write a lucid response to a particular post.
There are some sites (e.g. Soylentnews and Slashdot) that have a moderation and optional filtering system based on user voting - but that is rather more sophisticated than just clicking emojis, with rationed "mod points", descriptive reactions (such as "informative, interesting, funny, offtopic, troll") and a rule whereby you can either moderate or contribute to a thread, but not both... and it doesn't use emojis which probably helps keep it fairly rational. Not that there's any evidence that its perfect... Even if that were the way forward, it would need major software improvements, not just some bolted-on emojis.
I would suggest that the "proposition" is that all the reaction emojis should be removed with the debatable exception of "like" (which is fairly unambiguous, does actually seem to reduce "me too" posts and can always be used to support dissenting arguments).
I must admit that I really strongly dislike the presence and use of emojis such as the eye-roll or red-face because it seems like a 'non participatory trivialization' of the effort a contributor has made. There's also the fact that these emoji responses don't provide any basis on which they can be debated, so they are in effect merely passive-aggressive brain farts.
It does seem dubious to allow a 'disagree' emoji response to a factual statement - for example, I once corrected a post where a contributor had criticized Steve Jobs for a particular product, by explaining that Jobs had left the company 4 years previously - for which I got a 'disagree'. Do I really care? No, since someone who can't get their facts straight probably can't do much better with their opinions either, but I can't see where 'disagree' does anything useful in that kind of situation.
There are some posts in an objective sense worthy of a dismissive reaction and they should have their very own category. Maybe like the disagree emoji, they should only be enabled within the MR news forums.
But that mockery that you speak of happens today with the laughing emoji.
There are some posts so cringeworthy, imo, they deserve a down vote. No debate necessary, imo. There are also posts that one may have a position 180 to the poster and in my own opinion, downvoting said post should be allowed. If poster wants to debate said post with op, have at it, but it shouldn’t be a requirement.
People can still have an opinion on a factual statement as to whether it supports a discussion or not.
As I stated, emoji responses allow members to gauge the reaction of the community on a single post versus the thread. I also stated several other potential uses for them in post #11. There is no easy way for me to see all responses to a post on page 3 of a 20 page thread unless you read the entire thing, sometimes you just don't want to do that.
No, not meaningless, see above. Perhaps meaningless to you, but not to everyone. If you dislike the emoji so much then don't look at them? It's not like they take up half the page.
LOL, what? Do you really believe the MR community has small cliques that try to "manipulate" emoji responses to individual posts in an attempt to undermine the written words? Please reference a thread that has had its written responses "totally disregarded" by the little pictures. I think you give way too much weight to emoji.
Agreed. Emoji, at least for me, do not determine right or wrong, correct or incorrect, they allow only for a quick check on how the individual post was perceived.
Agreed, no forum is, they are basically opinion sites. I never suggested that it was or that "win or lose" was an intention. Again, emoji responses are a way to gauge community reactions, nothing more.
Last edited:
Ah, okay.
Thank you for your response, and for taking the time to explain the difference between them both.
Well if you want to be at that level, no emoji really conveys the underlying thoughts , but that is not a reason to not use them.
For example when a post is liked what does that really mean? The entirety of the post is like, one paragraph, sentence? Same for disagree. And why shoul disagree or angry require further discourse while like doesn’t?
Or we can accept the emoji system is imperfect and it’s another facet of social media to be used, not used, embraced or ignored.
Thanks for that explanation. It was instructive.
This still doesn’t get to the heart of how “Political News, as curated by staff” falls within the core remit of, say, MacRumours.
Some page one topic examples:
- Elon Musk Completes $44 Billion Twitter Takeover, Fires Top Executives, and Makes Himself CEO
- California AirTag Lawsuit Widened to Include Dozens More Stalking Cases
- UK Government Denies U-Turn on Plan to Scan Encrypted Messages
- NYC Bans TikTok on All City-Owned Devices
That these and other “political news“ topics were not suitable to post within the dozens of other MacRumours forums which run central to what MR does (and does well) lends to question their place in MacRumours in the first place.
MR forums excel at a few areas. They:
- cover news (confirmed and speculative) on forthcoming Apple products and services;
- facilitate discussion on those products and services and how they’re working (or not); and
- deliver a commons for folks to troubleshoot problems related to those products and services and to upgrade those.
Ancillary to these three core areas is a meta area to discuss the functioning of MR forums, such as Site and Forum Feedback and site maintenance.
“Political news” may have tech-adjacent topics. Yet this is also why tech news sites as The Register; Hacker News; and Reddit subforums have their remit — all of which are best equipped to focus on just that: the politics of tech, of which Apple are just a portion.
Counterpoint: a human reaction is, ipso facto, never objective. So there’s that.
Perhaps there isn’t a place for emoji-reactions to exist at all on the “Political news” forum, were it to continue to lope onward. This would render Political News an entirely discussion-response forum with no tallied reactions. But even doesn’t remove it as an edge case for the remit of MacRumours forums.
Semantics aside there are some posts so worthy of a downvote.
I think I would be okay with no reactions at all in the political news forums and each post, would be argued on its own merits. But I think the overall post count in the political forum would increase without the reactions.
I spend most of my MR forum time around the quiet, largely convivial nooks of the PowerPC forum and the Early Intel Macs forum. There, questions on getting equipment to work and questions around user upgrades are common.
The thumbs-up reaction on these (and, I’ve observed, on other OS- pr product-oriented sub-forums) comes in handy for post replies which either answer or strive to resolve the original question. Down the way, subsequent readers who are troubleshooting the same problem can find the relevant thread and be guided toward the fix they need by the consensus of the thumbs-up posts which successfully strove to get at the fix or remedy for that problem.
Without that “thumbs-up” reaction tool, these forums for troubleshooting and upgrading lose much of their utility and their purpose.
Occasionally, there are also times when a breakthrough happens, such as when dosdude1 figures out how to upgrade a core component in a, putatively, un-upgradeable system. This is where the “heart” and “wow” reactions are instructive, as it draws other readers to pay closer care to the content of those posts.
That ain’t semantics. That’s just fact.
Humans aren’t objective. We never have been. We try (do we ever), but human objectivity is akin to reaching absolute zero: the closer one tries getting there, the more energy gets expended and in the end, it never actually happens.
Perhaps.