not personal writing like the diary, not short one-liners i think up at ungodly hours of the night, welcome to the Other Writing Zone. yeah...i couldn't really think of a good name for this page not gonna to lie
why twitter reactions suck
this is about the little emoji you can use to react to a message when dm-ing. why are there only like five or six extremely specific ones? on instagram, you can only react to a messag with a heart. there is only one choice everyone has, so everyone knows it means different things depending on the circumstance--excitement, emotional support, agreement, that little heart has seen it all. jack of all trades, master of all of them too.
then you have something like discord. discord is the complete opposite of everything instagram's reaction system stands for. you get given an entire palette to paint the canvas of someone's message with. you can be extremely specific with your reactions, and therefore everyone knows to read exactly what you write with those emotes. if you reacted that way in real life, you can react that way to their message on discord.
this is where twitter comes in and ruins everything. i'm here trying to have some quality chit-chat with The Lads when they send a message that i had some kind of reaction to. "wow. that's a good message! the emotion i am feeling now is extremely specific and context-based, what will i send them?" what will i send them indeed. the problem with twitter reactions is that there is not one be-all-and-end-all reaction that applies to every "whatever you meant me to feel, i feel it" situation like instagram. nor is there a highly specific system like discord. what you get is a set of too-specific-yet-somehow-too-general??? reactions to work with. the crux of the problem is that with instagram, everyone knows that the heart is context-specific, and on discord everyone knows that what you react is what you mean because you have a choice. on twitter, because there is a choice it may give people the idea that, like discord, you mean what you react as you are given a set of options; however, with discord the reaction you send can be highly curated for subtext and all that other stuff we humans stupidly invented to make communication as difficult as possible. this subtext is exactly what CANNOT be controlled on twitter, where people may read into the reaction sent, trying to grasp what you mean. is it a general reaction, or do you actually mean what that little emoji implies you mean?
the answer is: who knows. what does :thumbs up: even mean am i a boomer dad yes kinda sir the point you made resonated with me 👍👍👍👍