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Negative Usage of Hail Hydras

Bit of a preface: When the Agree and Awesome reactions were first introduced, there was also a Disagree button. That was very quickly removed, and Tube made it abundantly clear that it would not be coming back. That he is against the idea of having disagree buttons or other negative reaction buttons to posts. No Dislike buttons, not Shit-Post buttons, none of that. I agree with Tube about this, I think it's a good policy. Positive reactions to posts are good for the community, negative ones are not.

That said, what I'm noticing happening with increasing frequency (or perhaps, maybe I'm just noticing it more often and it's happening with the same frequency it's been happening all along, I don't know) is that people have been using the Hail Hydra reaction (Either with the ? or the !) to express a negative sentiment. They disagree with a post, they dislike it, they're frowning at it, they're confused by it, etc.

How am I drawing that conclusion? By observing how else they are reacting to the same post. Some people will slap a Hail Hydra on a post, and then quote that very same post and make a vehement, personal argument against what they just quoted. Or you'll see someone Hail Hydra a post, and then someone else argues against that post in the very same thread quoting it directly, and the same person who Hail Hydra'd the initial post is putting an Agree on the argument against it. Or a post that gets a person infracted will have a bunch of Hail Hydras on it, and the moderator post in the thread that summons Geth and infracts them will have Agrees and Awesomes from the same people.

In those instances, the meaning of Hail Hydra is negative. It's a person passive-aggressively saying "I disagree" or "I dislike this post". I don't actually see a consistency between the type of Hail Hydra in this regard, like the ? one or the ! gets used more often than the other something. This isn't something I was like, running a stat macro on or something.

Interestingly enough, this is not something that I saw people doing with Bro? or So Raven. I'm not sure what it is about the Hail Hydra buttons where people sort of unspokenly decided that they were becoming the shit-on-post buttons, but for some people, they have become that.

Suggestion:

It might be time to retire Hail Hydra. If a bunch of people have somehow decided to start using it to be shitty to one another, that's not a good thing. I miss Bro? maybe we could bring that back, but if not we could either ditch the third reaction button entirely or maybe Icy could come up with some new wacky kind of third reaction (one maybe more unambiguously positive so people don't morph it into a passive-aggressive way to crap on people down the road?) or there could be a poll or I dunno.

Posts

  • AegeriAegeri Tiny wee bacteriums Plateau of LengRegistered User regular
    Bro? should not come back and Hail Hydra should be replaced by four new reactions, all of which should turn into further reactions upon them being struck down!

    But you aren't the only one to notice people using the reaction in this way (and actually some of the other ambiguous reactions like "So Raven", "Bro?" and similar - some people use them negatively).

    The Roleplayer's Guild: My blog for roleplaying games, advice and adventuring.
  • Al_watAl_wat Registered User regular
    Just to be clear my hail hydra? Is more like a whimpering "...you want to get rid of me?" Sad hydra.

    Not a negative disagree hydra.

  • MechMantisMechMantis Registered User regular
    Aegeri wrote: »
    Bro? should not come back and Hail Hydra should be replaced by four new reactions, all of which should turn into further reactions upon them being struck down!

    But you aren't the only one to notice people using the reaction in this way (and actually some of the other ambiguous reactions like "So Raven", "Bro?" and similar - some people use them negatively).

    Bro?s definitely did have a positive use, you'd see a whole bunch of Bro?s on posts where something unfortunate happened as an outpouring of empathetic support, "We're here for you, Bro".

    You could also see them on really, really dumb posts as in "Really, Bro?", but not to the extent as you see Hail Hydra being used like this.

  • TubeTube Registered User admin
    I have a policy on never making decisions based on essays written by Pony.

This discussion has been closed.