Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.
They kinda do this. If you disable emojis, you get their text representation. It's can be misleading because the text representation sometimes diverge from what the user thinks the emoji means.
This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.
No, you misunderstand. If you're not the person who hates reactions for unarticulated reasons, you won't have this option enabled, so you'll just see the reactions as emoji like most other people.
The person who hates reactions, OTOH, is going to see all these annoying notifications and unnecessary clutter, because he apparently prefers unnecessary clutter rather than a simple emoji. After all, these people are telling us they want others to type out long, wordy messages just to, for instance, acknowledge a prior message. My proposal here would do just this, but require the sender to do nothing different than before.
Yeah, that's kinda the idea. But I'm worried about preserving messaging integrity: if you just let that person set an option to never see reactions at all, then his coworkers will be sending reactions which he won't see, which will probably lead to conflicts ("why didn't you acknowledge that you saw my message?" "I did! I sent a thumbs-up!" "I've disabled reactions, so you need to type out these acknowledgements to me." "Fuck that!" -> HR has to get involved)
Basically, the anti-reactions people are going to be angry no matter what, because the rest of the world isn't doing messaging the way they want.
