I’m genuinely not sure yet how I feel about emoji reactions (I’ve never really used them or even thought about them) but I really feel like they don’t take away from the voting system.

The arrow voting system’s primary function is (or should be) sorting, and usually its secondary function is the agree/disagree button (if it weren’t that way, votes would be just hearts like in Discourse). I’ve for a while now thought it might be beneficial for those two functions to be separate. In essence, and I never saw this implemented, I’ve imagined a comment system with two scores, one is the standard up-arrow/down-arrow score, for example in the reddit UI in the top left of a comment, and the second one is the approve/disapprove score, in the reddit UI paradigm, in the lower right (either as thumbs-up/down buttons, or as heart/upside-down heart buttons, or smiley/frowny buttons, or heart/broken heart buttons, or whatever. The second score, of course. wouldn’t influence sorting, it would just be a visual marker of the comment’s approval.

Plenty of times, I thought a comment contributed to a discussion, was well written, made me think, and I thought more people should see it, but I actually disagreed with its conclusions, so I second guessed if I should upvote it. Or the opposite, I thought a comment was a bit of topic, but it made me laugh, and I wanted it lower sorted but also somehow appreciated. This was all particularly relevant with many many comments in large threads where sorting is important and valuable, not so much on current small scale lemmy.

Either way, I feel emoji reactions would solve this problem, but they might bring in new ones. I haven’t really thought about them too much.

It’s hard to come up with a universally great commenting/voting system. Some times I think HN’s bare bones system is better, sometimes I want to count the downvotes like on lemmy, sometimes I want something in between. And maybe, sometimes emoji’s are good, I don’t know.