This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens...
It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.
I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.
Genuine question: why?
This question is how we get opinionated software that slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it" should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a feature.
Perhaps it would be better to ask, how do you expect people to communicate to you those things that would be expressed as reactions?
Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
Ironically, since HN tends to dislike short content-less posts, which means quite often unless we have something more to say, we do not respond at all.
That is, there is no ack signal.
I know of a few company cultures like this. You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected. Everything else is just noise, and employees tend to keep the noise level quite low.
You can count on people to take action where action is requested, and to take note where taking note is expected.
Unfortunately, I work with humans and technology, both of whom are fallible. As such, reminders and prompts are occasionally required. Being able to tell if a message was received, read, and understood is a very useful signal.
lol
A lot of email communication happens by this same rule.
Reactions are an interesting workaround, where people that need to ack a message can just send one, and the client can collapse repeating ones into a number, not bothering anyone.
But, of course, every client needs to know about that for it to work.
Ok. (Followed by 20 other people responding with just "ok", filling the screen with spam)
I genuinely think that in this situation, you should do NOTHING instead of reaction. If the explicit ok is not needed, like on HN, then thumps up are not needed either.
It's a contrived situation but does represent a more general set of conversations where the need for response may be more ambiguous. There's a space where acknowledgements and reactions are useful without breaking the flow of conversation.
Ok
Ok.
Ok
Ok
Hacker News does have some reactions - upvote, downvote, flag.
ok
When the medium is email, I’m not expecting a reaction as it’s async communication method and if they want to react it’s in a form of another email reply. Occasionally I need a confirmation or something and I ask for it in the email, if they just gave me a thumbs up it becomes uncertain if it’s a confirmation because I’ve learned that some people thumbs up everything just to acknowledge it and I later find out they just want to signal they’re online and on top of things but actually never read my message
Except, by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have, by fiat, decided that you simply don't want to perceive the communication method they prefer. Coming to an agreement with others about how you want to communicate with them as fine, but communication is a two-way street, and so it has to be bilaterally negotiated by both parties, in which case it is very fair for someone to question your decision to unilaterally force everyone around you to change how they communicate by simply deciding to stick your head in the sand regarding one channel of communication. I find emoji reactions to be a much more efficient, direct and low boilerplate way of communicating, sometimes quite relevant and important information, and I would be extremely frustrated to the point of disgust if someone decided to simply turn them off and not perceive my reactions, thus forcing me to come up with polite non-phrases lile "looks good to me" to express the same reaction.
Also, I think this philosophy that all software must be infinitely configurable, so that it can serve every whim of every possible user, and that if it has a clear idea of what it wants to do and how it wants to achieve that, and sometimes that way it is designed to be used, it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something, is the fundamental sickness at the heart of open-source software design. It turns programs into unclear bloated piles of buttons and switches that are overcomplicated to use and impossible to properly quality assure and impossible to design in a coherent way. For powerful professional creation tools (CAD software, publishing, programming, etc) that will be the primary software used for decades by experienced and educated professionals who will want to optimize their workflow and who have the time to invest in deeply learning that one specific tool, then I think that philosophy is fine, but for random chat apps and stuff, it's just frustrating.
Some people pay per text message received. So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication" well then I'm sorry, but their preference is my cost, so I don't think it's out of line to politely ask them not to.
Ultimately, this is something that I'd rather be handled at the carrier layer: I should be able to have my phone reject a text message and not pay for / receive it.
On the topic of configurability: Software should ultimately serve the end user. When a developer makes an undesirable (to a user) change to the software and provides the user no way to opt out of that change, it's serving the developer's interests, and it's doing a slightly worse job at serving the user.
What, pay for receiving messages? I have never seen that, not during roaming or even on IoT plans or completely free plans.
Was(is?) common in USA
How does that even work? What if I spam you from a free sms gateway / unlimited sms plan?
AFAIK it resulted in huge bill for the receiver, though I have no idea if certain services weren't billed differently (wouldn't surprise me if you could send text messages that were billed only on sender side, for extra)
Maybe its different in other countries
So, they have to ask each and every one of their iMessage-using friends to please not send these ridiculous reactions, because they are ultimately another text message which will cost money. If that counts as "forcing others to adapt their communication
No, it doesn't, because that's engaging in bilateral negotiation of how the communication will go with the others involved in it. Unilaterally disabling the feature, however, is different, and that is what I was criticizing.
by turning them off, you are therefore forcing people who want to communicate with you to adapt to your communication preferences because you have
I don't see how. All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently.
If it actually begins to interfere with communications too much, I can turn them back on.
it's somehow unethical or abusive of the user or something
For me, that's not the thing at all. It's more that configuration options often make the difference between software being useful to me and not being useful to me. That's all.
All it means is that I won't see the reactions. That's my loss. I'm not forcing anyone else to do anything differently.
"Are we ok doing ...?"
(People reacting with :+1:)
Now you have to figure out if you're being ignored or people don't have an answer. You ask them again directly, which they may also simply react to.
By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things differently for you.
For christ sake, if there is explicit question do not react with reaction only, but use words.
Because, recipient does not know whether you are acknowledging that you read that question or answering it or what. Emoji reactions are ambiguous majority of the time. Which is fine when they are used to add emotions to the discussion, but not fine when you are actually communicating with it.
Well, nobody I know would respond to such a question with a reaction (an emoji, yes, a reaction, no), so this is not an issue in my crowd. I suppose (and it's obvious now that I think about it) this depends on what the social norms are in your group.
By bothering them again, you are asking them to do things differently for you.
To a trivial degree, sure. Why is it OK for others to ask me to do things differently in this regard and not for me to ask them to do things differently anyway?
Social interaction always involves compromise and reasonable accommodations for others. In this sense, I ask people to do things differently for me every day, and they usually do. And others ask me to do things differently every day, and I usually do. It's part of the social negotiations that make societies work.
I do feel the need to reiterate that I am not opposed to reactions generally. Only in email.
Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the space. Which brings us back to, "Why?"
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.
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.
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.
I have a strong feeling that the type of person who hates reactions is going to hate this even more, but maybe that's just me.
feature of the software being software, sure, but when there's a human on the other side, it's different when it's within a small group context.
Old Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
Young’in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go all emo.jpg
Honestly if someone were to send me a message that only required a simple acknowledgement, and that person hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged. But I suspect what you’re really wanting is typed acknowledgment?
I don't want my messages acknowledged, it's just The Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know, otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say Thanks, you're paying me to do it
Although it seems the military metaphor of Two Generals' Problem which I assume you're referencing is incidental, it's ironic that in the actual military all communication from superior to subordinate must be acknowledged perfunctorily, at least in very disciplined services like the United States Marine Corps.
For example, if a sergeant says to a private "It's a nice day outside.", the private is obliged to respond, even if the statement is rhetorical. This leads to perfunctory responses, in this case it would be "Aye aye sergeant", or "Aye sergeant", or more casually "Er" or "Kill". You're not obliged to agree, just to acknowledge. Pretty similar to tapback responses in messenger apps and emails.
If this is a thing (never saw it in 20 years of active and reserve Navy service), it must be limited not just to the Marine Corps, but the ground side of the Corps, not the air side.
Sure, there's norms around how you talk on the radio, standing watch on the bridge, on chat channels for command and control, etc. But the rest of the time, the rest of the military talks to each other more or less like normal people with the addition of acknowledging relative rank.
I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know
You’ve replaced “read” in the first part with “agree” in the second, and those are not at all the same thing. I can’t let you know that I haven’t read your message.
If a parent says to the other “hey, I’m running late, I need you to pick up Tiny Tim from school”, an acknowledgement is paramount even if you read, understood, and agreed to the message.
it's just The Generals Problem.
That problem is concerned with an unreliable communication channel, which does not apply to the situation.
Most of the time I would be fine with the plain old read receipt + no other mail stating protest. The reactions have too different set between clients to convey enough meaning for me.
I would probably just send the emote I would react with as a single-letter answer. If I have nothing to say beyond "thumbs up emoji" the fact that you don't like reactions doesn't, by virtue of your opinion, give me anything more interesting to say in return.
It should be entirely socially acceptable to respond to any trivial message with "ACKNOWLEDGED" á la Picard
I agree. Also, if the message proposes any action, it should be appropriate to reply with "Make it so.".
What is wrong with "Roger" and "Wilco"?
These are shorter. And remind me of the voice chat program Roger Wilco too.
Well 'ack' is even shorter, and the common form of 'ACKNOWLEDGED' for such use. I've seen & used both ack & wilco in a technical/software chat context.
I use this, though I find that many folks, including many technical folks, interpret it as an exclamation of distaste (as in, "agh! ach! ack!"), so it may pay to be judicious.
Oh interesting, I have come across that, but only one person (both uses it like that and misinterpreted it when we worked with people that ack'd, which of course I saw coming & could explain since I was accustomed to his use) - didn't realise that was common too. (I would use agh/argh/ugh for that personally, depending on precise feeling(!))
Cathy (from newspaper funny pages) would frequently use "ACK!" as an exclamation of distress/frustration.
This must be why my wife asks if I'm okay (or if I saw a spider, etc) when I reply to her text messages with "ACK".
Nothing. "Make it so." isn't "I'll make it so" (aka. wilco) - it's "you make it so". "I agree with your idea, so you go make it happen".
BRB hacking "Engage!" into https://github.com/marketplace/actions/manual-workflow-appro...
Why do you need to respond at all? The phone tells you that the message has been delivered, and if you didn't ask a question or otherwise request a response why would there be any obligation to do so?
A delivery receipt, an automatic read receipt, and a human ack are quite distinct. The first means the device will offer it to a user who eventually looks. The second means the device expects that the user saw it. The third means the user definitely saw and understood it.
It's rarely obligatory (unless the sender literally requests an ack) but is more to offer a data point just in case it happens to be useful. In some cases it will definitely be useful, like to unblock something that can't proceed until the sender knows you've been briefed. For example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later than 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually staying out late is blocked by my ack. Of course, this could just be turned into a yes/no question awaiting my answer, but that would be silly considering that I only say yes; they're not soliciting a decision from me, just acknowledgement.
For example, if I tell my kids they can stay out later than 10pm any night if I know about it, then even if they message me saying they'll be out late tonight, actually staying out late is blocked by my ack.
Do you have an integration test for that in CI? That protocol sounds like the kind of thing which can break easily.
If I as a kid would hear that instruction "can stay out later than 10pm any night if parent knows about it" I would assume notification is necessary, but I would not return home early just because my parent did not ack it. And if my parents complained about that I would find them unreasonable.
Of course with your kids you might have been much more explicit about what you expect from them. Or who knows, maybe you are much more predictable in your response times than my parents were, so your kids might worry about you and call you if you don't respond anything.
I was just trying to come up with a scenario involving an obligatory ack (but not one in response to someone literally requesting a response every time), as a way of showing that while an ack is not typically obligatory, theoretically there could be a counter examples in the form of the ack-seeker twiddling their thumbs until ack, so to speak. I think you're right that these hypothetical kids would find it infuriating, and such protocol would work better if every ack-seeking message actually had a question ("11pm, ok?") making it explicit. It's just weird to pose a question if the answer is the same 100% of the time, and the only variable is timely receipt. How about this: "11pm, lmk" -- but the suffix is wasted keystrokes whatever it is.
Well that's what the reactions are for, right? Because then we have this sort of division between acks (and other reactions really) vs "actual messages". Combine that with specific emojis in certain social/professional circles and you've got yourself an extra layer of nuance in an otherwise tricky-to-navigate space!
Networking software engineers just say "ack".
My friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to happen anyway.
wilco
ack
Concur without comment.
I usually shorten it to simply "I concur", if no comment follows, it is a given. Maybe if you are using a lossy message format where a potential comment might get left out it would be necessary to make that part clear, but for most things it is a given.
I don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like that outside onto the public internet is absurd.
Gmail has had this feature since 2023: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
You keep posting this over and over. So what? Is it supposed the be okay because Google does it too?
Gmail now has emoji reactions too. Eg see the smiley face here: https://imgur.com/a/0cYSLMQ
They launched it last year[1].
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”.
We've had macros on computers since at least the 1980's. Just pick your standard acknowledgement and bind it to a hotkey, or a text expansion.
On macOS: Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…
Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in.
Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
I agree. I'm not anti-reactions. I'm anti-reactions in email.
The reaction email doesn't have some specific header that can be used to block it?
The UX problem is you send an e-mail, and someone "thumbs up" a response, and then you block the response and assume that they didn't care to respond, while they think they have responded.
The distance between "didn't care to respond" and a thumbs up emoji response is measured in angstroms.
I suppose it'd be OK if the other side of your TCP connections stopped sending ACKs.
This is cute, but not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email, otherwise people would never stop responding.
not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email
Obviously context dependent. For time-sensitive emails, it’s common to follow up with a call if receipt isn’t acknowledged.
Be sure to CC everybody. /s No. The technology isn't built for this.
I'm pretty sure a large number of e-mail conversations (i.e. not just announcements) end in one person saying, "OK", "Will do", "See you then", "I'm too busy, sorry" or some such response. It's very uncommon to send out an e-mail to someone and ask them to do something or consider something and then assume it has been received without acknowledgement.
Email is used for a lot of things. It could be used as a message broker in batch processing systems. /s (Seriously, there are MIME types for that.)
I'm being surrounded right now by examples in multiple domains where it is clear that the moral of the story is that one person taking an action is different than a company packaging that action up and selling it as a solution to a general problem. This seems to be a lesson which needs to be generally remembered, explored, and learned. Again.
While one person responding "will do!" is appropriate 1:1, it is typically not appropriate to /reply all/ when doing it or to reply to a distribution list when doing it. I mean there are exceptions to everything: "Reply 'will do!' to this all-staff@ message or you're fired." But generally it's a meme, an anti-pattern (and there, I did it again).
Many people have built autoreply systems for email to respond with helpful advice to frequent topics. (Happy to help, I've done it before.) Similarly email clients (MUAs) which have macro / scripting capabilities for filtering or replying are not new.
What's new here? If it can be called new, it's that somebody provided that macro capability and linked it to an optional email header the sender can provide which enables / disables the ability to run macros in the client. In theory; or something. We (or at least I) don't know if it's possible to add your own macros.
I imagine this comes with tools in the client or in alias management to manage "reply all" / "me too": in other words it might be possible for someone to disable macros when responding to messages sent to all-staff@. I expect other extensions which reach across boundaries of control to follow if this one floats, and that's why I consider it a shitshow.
“Please let me know if you were able to read this attachment.”
Really?
ACK is required for TCP to work, reply is not for email.
With a thumbs-up I know they've read it, and that's worth quiet a bit in this asynchronous communication world of ours.
We used to (and I believe still) have Read Receipts for this.
Oh yeah, the thing I always turn off or filter out because the last thing I need is another way spies and hackers and ad men can track every waking moment of my life.
read receipts just mean you opened the message, not that you actually read it. It's a terrible misnomer.
Read Receipts are invasive, because they signal when I read it - which might well not be when I want to reply. I could read an email today and then decide I'll reply tomorrow or next Wednesday, because reasons; but the sender will see the read receipt and just assume I hate their guts for not replying immediately to the Most Important Person In The World (i.e. them).
So I turn them off as a matter of routine on all my accounts.
That was another groupware feature that was great for small orgs and terrible for the general net.
Yes! +1 And it's possible to disable Read Receipts and a lot of people do. A lot of people mangle beacon pixels too.
The distance between "not detectable" and "detectable" is vast and significant, no matter how minute the unit of measurement.
No. When you block an email the sender will get a notification email from their mail server that their message was blocked. They will not assume anything for very long.
When you block an email the sender will get a notification email from their mail server that their message was blocked
And if that blocked message was a reaction I’d assume I can move on: they sent an email, I sent a response, they refused to accept it and then spammed me to boot.
I agree, this is clearly worse, whether it's "your e-mail has been rejected" or "this server is not configured to accept 'reactions'", it's unnecessarily hostile to a user who probably doesn't understand that Microsoft has done something non-standard. And they will probably assume that you don't know what you're doing, because your e-mail doesn't work.
The reaction sender's Exchange server would see it and could decide to not display the rejection to the user, since the Exchange server knows it's "just" a reaction that was rejected.
Nobody will spam you except your service provider. My mail server will just return error to your service provider when it tries to send email to it over SMTP.
and then spammed me to boot
There is a misunderstanding about how this works and how email works:
* Rejecting an email during the SMTP exchange results in the /sending/ server returning a response to the sender. This is NOT spam and it not under the control of the receiver.
* Rejecting an email post-acceptance and sending a reply is called /blowback/ and is typically considered poor practice and a type of spam. (But not UCE.)
* Adding a header to an outgoing message which causes the recipient's email server to possibly generate an email message to the recipient when they reply has nothing to do with the sender. The recipient's email provider is doing this, and the problem is you.
Let's recapitulate:
1) You use Microsoft as an ESP.
2) Somebody sends you a message, received by your ESP with this header.
3) Your ESP takes an action based on this header which results in you receiving feedback.
The whole thing is a shitshow, oblivious to externalities; but whatever.
That's email server dependent. When my mailserver blocks emails, it just drops them onto the floor. The sender doesn't get any sort of notification.
That's not blocking, then. You're just accepting the email and not doing anything with it. It's usually called "blackholing". It's less nice to the senders for obvious reasons.
It's been called blocking for decades, but sure, we can call it whatever you like. From my point of view, it's blocking because it blocks the emails from reaching me.
If a person has something substantive to say to me they can put out the effort to type at least one human written full sentence in reply, either via a message platform like slack, signal, or replying to the email.
That would be a pretty suboptimal user experience for both parties, don't you think?
Depends on what you're optimizing for, how big of a problem not knowing whether someone read your email is to you specifically, and for what kinds of emails/senders this happens.
I just tested with an Exchange domain and nope, the reaction email has only standard headers and a bunch of x-ms- headers that are the same as for a regular email from that domain. In particular, it has an `x-ms-publictraffictype: Email` header that regular emails also have, and the envelope content-type and inner content-types are also identical (`multipart/alternative` and `text/plain; charset="us-ascii"` / `text/html; charset="us-ascii"` respectively).
Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is
I, just like the blog author, disable remote images in emails. So I wouldn't get the "intended experience" anyway. Actually, does anyone besides Outlook users get the intended experience here?
Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
Another old dog refusing to learn a new trick. If you want to talk about not part of email culture, let's not forget images weren't part of the original. So people got over that. They embraced it just like they embraced HTML emails and everything else. You can stand in the middle of the stream, but it's just going to go right on by you
Not everyone embraced it.
I still use a plain-text email client.
In case you haven't realized, you're the odd one out, today, in 2024. I don't mean this in a negative way - I just mean that you're out of what's usual.
Do you genuinely think the GP needs you to point that out to them?
I can't think of a single person I know that uses a text-only email client (and yes, I know more than one of them) who isn't what you'd call a "power user".
All of them know that most people don't use a plain-text email client, they just prefer to use one themselves.
I always wonder about these "you're in the minority" responses. Why is that an important point? Also, pretty much everybody on HN is "in the minority". We're a pretty narrow demographic compared to the general population.
I wonder if Gmail and Outlook interop on Emoji Reactions.
Gmail launched the feature in 2023[1].
I’ve personally not used the feature but emojis shouldn’t be images — they are after all Unicode code points. Not sure why MS’s implementation uses images at all.
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
Most corporate users are Outlook users - looking at the stats for some of our customers, most of their messages go straight back to Exchange instead of any other e-mail host
Reactions was also not part of the chat culture a decade back.
At least I don't remember anything similar in IRC or ICQ.
I value my attention. I don't spent it on artificially generated responses. If someone wants to communicate with me I insist they put in some minimum level of effort. Before email, it took work to write a letter, which helped weed out low signal-to-noise communiques. Messages the likes of spam, LLM-generated content, and reactions go straight to my trash folder. I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message.
It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day and it's a necessary filter.
Personally, reactions serve as a fast signal for “acknowledged” that spares me having to see a new email that says “Ok”.
I think read receipts may be a better solution for what most people seem to use the reaction buttons for. Then again, I don't really care either way. I can see the value of email reactions, but that does require clients to build in support for the standard.
The text fallback also isn't great, I'd much rather they'd sendan email with nothing but the emoji than "person X reacted to your message". I suppose this is more corporate-compliant?
The problem with read receipts is that (1) it’s useful for spammers to see that their email went through, and (2) I don’t want to automatically share with people when I read the email or instant message, so i would turn off the feature even if spam wasn’t an issue.
You prefer an automatically generated read receipt that basically means "this person clicked somewhere in their client, it happened to open the email, maybe they read it, maybe it was an accident" to "this person read your email and consciously decided to acknowledge it and chose a particular 'reaction' to hint at what they mean"? Really?
"I don't spent it on artificially generated responses"
This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a nod and a thumbs-up.
"I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message."
If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem, this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's nice).
Geez. You complain about disrespect, and then you explain you want everyone to cater to your particular requirements and waste their own time (instead of using the feature designed to save everyone's time) because you... "value your attention"?
For what it’s worth, I’m not a big user of outlook, but I use reactions a lot in chat.
I like receiving reactions specifically because they save me time. When I get a typed message, I often take time to think through whether the sender is expecting some sort of acknowledgement (confirming that I got their message letting me know that I’m welcome to thank them again any time!) or whether it’s polite to terminate the exchange by not responding. Overall, I spend far more time than I’d like second-guessing my words. When I just get a reaction, it serves as a form of acknowledgement that doesn’t demand further response and frees me from an obligation.
It isn't materially different than replying "OK" in that both a thumb's-up notification and an "OK" reply both act as distractions from whatever meaningful activity I'm engaging in, the same with all the DINGS and BUZZES and BANNERS and POP UPS that vie for my precious attention.
I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be. Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value.
/rant
This is actually something I like about Slack’s implementation: reactions don’t generate notifications.
You can disable reaction notifications in Teams too but it's not the default option.
It isn't distasteful, it is harmful.
I asked a question recently to someone and got a "like" back as the "answer". I then spent one minute pondering wtf this message even was (it was the first of its kind that I received) and another pondering wtf the respondent meant as the question was not of the form "do you like XXX?".
This "feature", at least in this case, was not a form of communication of but a disruptive form of confusion.
This "feature" is not just distasteful but actively harmful and anti to accepted email communication norms. On Slack it's annoying enough but it's a norm so it is merely distasteful.
In email, I see it as yet another EEE method from Microsoft.
I guess i fail to see how your example is different from someone responding with "K" or some other equally unhelpful non-reaction response
I like using them but I hate that they leave the "campus" automatically.
Agreed - I find it a very nice way to effectively send a "Thanks" email internally without cluttering the recipient's inbox with "Thanks" emails... but this only makes sense to me for internal mails/workflows.
Two issues: It's not a standard, Microsoft just did this with the assumption that most people are using Outlook anyway. They didn't care how this would work for everyone else.
Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context, culture or mood or the recipient.
There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions" in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers have all the hallmarks of a hack.
Not anti-reaction, but against instant message style reaction in email! Don't smear in what is not there, it was not about abolishing reactions from the universe, those have their place still! Like bicycle bells go with your bicycle not with a horse.
If you can't be assed to actually write something out, then why should anybody else think your reaction worthy of their time? If it wasn't worth anything to you, then it isn't worth anything to me.
I am not anti reaction as such, especially when it's just a thumbs up, although I very seldom use it myself.
However I really struggle with emojis as a general concept. I don't understand a lot of them, and it seems people put a lot of hidden meaning into them that I have to interpret, and I feel the cognitive load is a lot bigger than if people would just type out what the fuck they are trying to say.
It’s usually unnecessary and triggers notifications stealing my attention. If I silence them I might miss some actual change in conversation status. (Eg. Someone asks a question and the answer is in the form of a thumbs down reaction, if notifications are off I am unwittingly waiting for the answer until I check the conversation again)
Usually on multiple devices. That said, they are fine when on certain mediums. Chat and slack type stuff where it’s sync conversations that’s fine (although on larger groups and at work it starts becoming an asynchronous bulletin board more than a chat). Email is asynchronous and I only need the final response if the conversation even requires one. If I’m asking you a question I don’t need an acknowledgment reaction followed by an answer 3 hours later. Just send the answer 3 hours later. If I asked you a question and said I needed an answer quickly, you could say I can’t get it to you for 3 hours or if you never say anything I’m going to assume you won’t be answering me (that’s ok!) but if you acknowledge it I will assume you’re working on the quick response I asked for and if o don’t get it I’ll probably be upset or wondering what the problem is.
Anyways, in general we’ve built up a lot of norms for various mediums. Email norms don’t need to follow chat norms.
In email, it would just be an annoyance that bulks out the inbox. Not a huge deal, but filtering them out would improve the experience.
Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't really add anything.
In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails.
Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
I literally had to set up a “Congratulations / Congrats” filter to auto-delete those emails because they were so frequent and numerous when various accomplishments across the org were announced. The party popper emoji at least makes that far more tolerable.
I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire org / company / world.
Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand?
Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.
I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative expectations everyone is operating under.
Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant.
You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows.
In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.
Well shit, I haven't been going to the all-hands either!
I hadn't been for ages, and then my manager brought up my lack of attendance in my 1on1. I had a flash of insight that the point wasn't that I was missing an important communication channel (because that would have had obvious knock-on effects), but that there was a social issue at play, and that's what led to my view shifting to this social-fealty kinda vibe.
because those are supposed to be visible to each recipient by design. outlook will just show the emoji inside the e-mail header, nothing more than that, not as a different email. unfortunately, as this is not a standard, for users of other email clients this will not work as expected.
I read that as “party pooper” - I want that as a reaction emoji.
Have a few too many drinks at the christmas party and go for it.
Last year the executives beat everyone to the punch: hard limit of two drinks max from the bar, and you couldn't bring anything in.
Party: pooped.
I’m not an Outlook user, and I really dislike the product.
But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.
Something like an iMessage of mail.
Surely there’s an RFC for that right?
I've always thought about just making a chat client app using email as the underlying standard. Strip out CSS and signatures (and funnel spam/marketing to a separate UI) and bam, you have possibly the most widely-interoperable chat client ever made.
The ostensible "problem" with this would probably be "email is too slow for real-time chat!" But really, how much difference does a few seconds make? And modern connections/tech make me think that idea might have to be reevaluated anyways.
It wouldn't be a business but I could see such an app becoming quite popular.
I've always thought about just making a chat client app using email as the underlying standard.
I'm happy to report that this already exists: https://delta.chat/
Something like https://delta.chat/ ? There was also a project/protocol called Chat-over-IMAP (COI): https://github.com/coi-dev/coi-specs
Surely there’s an RFC for that right?
Indeed, there is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078
It's used by Delta Chat (IM over email).
I'm a Linux user myself, but I've since given up on using a standalone email client, and just use the Outlook web interface...
Why? Because of these reactions?
I have never seen one myself.
Thunderbird.
Reactions might make sense in that context because they probably shouldn't be using email for these kinds of exchanges.
My mental model is Exchange is a really database, Outlook is a database client, and SMTP is bolted on the side. Things that make sense in the MS ecosystem map poorly onto SMTP/conventional email, but that doesn't stop them foisting it on everyone...
The UI to spot the 'reaction' is really bad though. I got a mail to my work Outlook which was some kind of daily digest with the thumbs up.
Make no fáking sense still receiving those stupid internal emails that 'Your Colleague Joe reacted to your email', and then the reaction is a censored picture of course, because they protect your privacy in the most stupid way saving you from their own reaction picture too.
They should use Teams then, MS is in the process implementing untold horror into that one (my unfortunate friend works there) where they could live out nighmarish feature dreams and leave the email for actual content. Or keep all emails inside the company - send out the pigeons! - for f's sake then if they insist emoji based infantile communication.
That’s the ideal but it’s not what I’ve observed in practice. In my org, people send reactions and reply all emails like this. It’s just more distraction.
I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.
Perhaps the emails have both html and plain text representations, and you've configured your client to only show the plain text version?
you almost got it!
This was likely winmail.dat/TNEF[0], Microsoft's proprietary replacement of HTML.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
TNEF is a container/encapsulation format rather than a markup language. It can contain HTML as well as RTF and plain text.
Granted HTML rendering of email is full of quirks in Outlook
It's using Word to render html. They tried using a browser engine but then it rendered a copy-pasted Word text differently and users hated that.
Now that they are transitioning the desktop version of Outlook into an Electron-like webview, I suppose showing HTML directly in the webview is out of the question, and they must be using the Javascript version of Word to render HTML...
And everyone on Microsoft ecosystem hates the new Outlook version.
We already have the 365 Web version for that.
Yet another example of Microsoft's failure to hire employees with native Windows development skills, now with the old guard that grew up with Win32 are reaching retirement age.
If you ever though nobody had an use-case for WASM...
So funny, my mother would send me emails from work and I would see J every now and then. First letter of my first name is J so I kept thinking she was just referring to me but she was sending a smiley face
In had exactly the same experience when emailing my father.
Haha I too was confused about this J character for a long time and took it for some corporate thing when I first started out on a full time corporate job.
Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in outlook.
Apparently it was the <font> tag in the emails (guess it had to be a HTML email): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...
The conversion from emoticons to wingding J's occurred at the server level. I've sent emails in Mutt through an exchange server that, when quoted back to me, had the ASCII smileys converted to J's.
Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of emails sent through them.
Oh, this is good to know! I haven't encountered this issue personally yet, but maybe once I've updated my mailserver, I won't encounter it in the future.
Now to figure out how to stop the same thing happening in SMS.
You'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have reactions
SMS is being replaced with RCS, which does have reactions…even Apple is adding RCS…
Welcome to the future.
RCS is already here on Android, but I keep it disabled in order to avoid read receipts and typing indicators.
You can disable read receipts and typing indicators without disabling RCS
You can? That didn't used to be the case on my phone at all. Glad to hear they changed that.
If you're texting with an iOS user and they use a reaction, Apple "helpfully" forwards the reaction as text. Which is OK. What I don't like is that it also quotes the complete text that the person reacted to.
You can like a message a page up, for example, and you’ll get a random “user liked your message” and be completely lost.
True. There's no solution to this that appeals to everyone. Personally, it wouldn't bother me at all to not know which message got "liked" (because "liking" something doesn't really say anything that important), but I can see how it could be important to others.
Android does this too. I am in several group chat's with Android users and their reactions are also sent the same way.
<iPhone user> reacted haha to your message
<iPhone user> liked your message
Liked “You'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have reactions”.
It’s really the most clunky backfill that Apple chose, I suspect on purpose.
Apple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’.
In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.
I like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they revert to their SMS ways occasionally.
I no longer get those messages in the default SMS app on my Pixel 8. Either google or apple updated something, they now show as emojis on the original message as intended.
Google finally started parsing those in 2022[0].
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-imessage-reac...
RCS is finally coming to iOS though, so soon this should be resolved.
Not to Google Voice though, because Google loves nothing more than orphaning communications products.
This reminds of when Microsoft released a comic strip chat client for IRC. You would have these people popping into IRC channels with all kinds of metadata about their character. It was fine for them, but super annoying for everybody with a normal client.
I guess it was designed to be used with MSN servers, but people used them to connect to the "regular" ones as well.
Microsoft Comic Chat installed a custom font, Comic Sans MS, that users could use in other applications and documents.
We have finally found the root of all evil.
As an Android user, I often wonder if Apple users realize how stupid their replies look to non-Apple users. I wonder if I should tell them or just move on.
Apple doesn't care what Android users think as long as the majority of Americans continue to think iPhone's are "premium" products, are willing to spend $1k to buy a new iPhone because they don't have a slot for an SD card so that's the only way to get more space, and genuinely believe YOU are the dumb one for buying an "inferior" Android phone.
On second thoughts (looks at Camelot), let's not go there. It's a silly place.
Every day a new form of cancer.
It's truly exhausting how often I read a tech article and think, "Just when you think software couldn't get worse..."
What if every time users added a reaction to an email, they got "microsoft points" towards unlocking new reaction emojis?
:)
(gah, maybe it's dangerous to even joke about this)
Don't tell the Bing team.
Imagine a poop emoji stamping on a human face, forever.
You'll absolutely love this one then:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-ann...
I don't have strong feelings about this, but can someone please change the emoji palette in Teams? I feel like I'm typing in Club Penguin chat.
I wonder if tech nostalgia has reached the point where someone has built a Club Penguin chat clone.
Oh no, the truth is worse than I imagined: https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-shuts-down-club-pengu...
Reminds of of the Chris Morris movie Four Lions, in which the would-be terrorists use a similar kids side called Puffin Party to coordinate.
I haven't seen this type of messages. Where is it coming from?
Microsoft Outlook.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-micr...
Good lord, IMO this has no place in a business environment
Wait till you see the state of error messages today. Not far from this joke https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room.
Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.
In our company we work a lot remotely and everyone is in chat when working hour. Emojis are used a lot. It's much less disturbing if n people give a thumbs up to acknowledge a message instead of everyone typing a new message "OK". Especially when they read hours later.Also "working on it" is common if someone reports a problem.
Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous reactions.
Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in normal IRC clients.
All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the time.
(The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)
Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.
Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.
at least it gave us Jerkcity
It was annoying when Apple did this with SMS. I haven't seen it yet in my workplace, maybe our admins found a way to turn it off?
Bless them
"Or you can use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from my former job
Is that what I'm supposed to tell to all those Outlook users?
To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback, that internally it’s just a regular, human-readable email, is quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it just always English? That’d be bad).
I work on a chat component library (https://talkjs.com) and we support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as chat messages in the conversation. It’d be very natural for us to add reaction support to the emails too, but I’d be reluctant to do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.
This is exactly the sort of thing that unix old timers would have done. Funny its getting disliked cause it's microsoft
Ugh that is stupid. Outlook/Exchange already add a bunch of custom headers - you'd think they could use those to opt-in clients that are known to support this feature instead of making the rest of the world opt-out. That approach would provide a better experience for both Outlook users (since they would always know who could actually receive their reactions) and non-Outlook users (who wouldn't have to put up with the annoying reaction spam).
Reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, which used to mangle IRC messages to pass additional metadata.
This is the "extend" part of "EEE", where companies try to make it a nuisance to not use their products based on a standard tech stack.
Or, you know, you could just turf all e-mails with those "reacted to your message" Subject: headers, and not use any MS specific headers in what you send.
This reaction thing seems like a gift from Microsoft to spammers. E-mail recipients have a "like" button that instantly generates a reply, validating that the e-mail address is staffed.
It's pretty amazing how Microsoft has consistently been shitting all over E-mail for the last 30 years or so. I still remember how Outlook was introduced in the 90s and E-mail started going down the drain because of it.
Microsoft have made several oopsies in the past ignoring opt-outs, i.e. OneDrive.
Now if only there were a way to prevent iPhone users from sending reactions to my SMS messages!
From that article:
I knew about the Google Maps thing, I didn't know about this. That kind of stuff is so presumptuous and user hostile it's outrageous.
Yep. My WiFi has had _optout_nomap ever since it was introduced. People always ask me why and I've never seen another SSID with it included.
Come over to my place and we can possibly be the first people ever to bond over their home wifi SSIDs ;)
I really miss the days when people put time and thought in to their SSIDs instead of using the defaults
Mine is "go fuck yourself" so whenever anyone asks what my wifi is, it results in a hilarious exchange.
And the password is either "figure it out for yourself", "check the packaging", "try 123456 backwards", or "I don't know"?
On of my neighbors SSID used to be some bad words towards people working in IT. I think he got some bad experience with his ISP support.
There's a certain comfort, and security, from the anonymity afforded by randomly generated SSIDs.
My parents were 'CIA moble survalance unit'.
My Unifi setup has whitelisted devices. Everything else is completely crippled on the WiFi.
I’m happy for how easy it is to do this.
Google maps cars go around scanning WiFi SSIDs so they can map them to geolocations.
Google maps doesn't need to be able to connect to your wifi in order to use it for location detection. i.e. You still need to add _nomap to the ssid.
I saw a _nomap once! Mentioned it to those around me and nobody knew what it was of course. Must admit I didn't know of optout until now either
Would it be better to have an op-out database, where you have to log in with a Google account, and prove that you own the device somehow using geolocation?
The system has to be resistant against bad actors taking someone else off the map who chooses to opt in.
It would be better if the syntax were simpler, like changing myhouse to __myhouse (double underscore == private identifier).
By setting SSID a certain way, you simultaneously show your intent to opt out and prove that you're the operator.
This assumes such a database is necessary in this first place, which in my mind would require serious justification to prove, given that it creates a situation where the customer’s security is degraded by default.
I do wonder how much it actually does improve location accuracy on phones. Certainly if you have no GPS signal at all it'll give you something rather than nothing, but if you do have GPS, does it really improve things?
At my workplace it used to identify my location as various places within a 300 mile radius of my actual location correlating (at best) to places where our ISP had a footprint, but sometimes even places that it didn't. In any case I had never connected to to our WiFi with my phone, so it would have to be correlating the IPs of users who had. I eventually found a place where you could submit location services corrections to Google and now it gets within 100 feet of the building.
We used to joke about making a digital sign above our office door saying "Welcome to ___" which would use the location returned by the Google AGPS service.
Ever since "private relay" became available on my iphone (which I don't disable even when at home), whenever I get on google maps on my PC (so not going through the private relay) google maps always shows me in random cities hundreds of miles away.
Maybe this has been useful when introduced, but I'm not convinced it still is the case.
If you are in an urban area (especially at the time it was introduced), it will really improve things, mainly because GPS* signal reflections in urban areas disrupt proper positioning. It won't put you into another continent but it tends to be around two magnitudes worse, especially when you're moving (from ~1 meter to ~100 meters). The fact that multi-band GPS is now common does reduce this problem, but this is still helpful in dense areas with high skyscrapers that can still attenuate both bands.
* I'm using GPS here as shorthand for all GNSS systems (including GLONASS and Galileo).
Without it, your phone's location services would be next to useless in any kind of more urban area (next to useless = you'd have to wait for minutes for the phone to get a fix and burn a lot of battery in the process). It would not function inside a lot of buildings _at all_.
People HATE HATE HATE and complain loudly at their phones if they fall back to pure A-GNSS positioning.
no it would be great if you had to prove you own the device to opt-in.
After the most massive awareness campaign you can imagine to get people to know about this at all, the opt-in rate would likely be < 0.00000001%. Cash-like incentives would be required. Likely, router manufactures would have to be bribed to promote that to the users, and have some opt-in screen in the router firmware.
oh no, that's sad. anyway.
The "_optout_nomap" postfix atleast gives a veneer of privacy that your SSID doesn't need to be sent by every nearby device to a backend service to see if it's in the opt-out database and logged/read by some government backfeed etc.
Be thankful that this actually works. It wouldn’t if both Microsoft and Google checked for the magic token at the end of the SSID string :-/
I learned about this recently when I looked at using beacondb[1] as network geolocation provider.
[1] https://beacondb.net/privacy/
Opting out via ssid is pull the table cloth off at a wedding level absurd. Effectively this design is we saying we respect you so little that you might be able deactivate this feature if tattoo your choice on your face but we might might ignore that too because fuck you for disagreeing.
Iirc the same optout method is used opting out of WiFi scanning.
Blanket behavior like this should always be opt in with explicit informed and uncoerced consent. A laughable proposition in this corporate world but a worthy aim nonetheless.
You are not wrong and I agree with you that this sort of bullshit is laughably unacceptable.
Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption. So I expect to keep seeing these sort of infernal acts as people get bright but misguided ideas that require broad adoption to work. for example googles wifi cataloging does not work at all if to get cataloged you have to put "_cataloged" in your ssid.
Sharing your host's WiFi password with all your contacts should never get a wide adoption. It should never be an option anyway.
It shows Microsoft's astonishing ignorance of security.
Well, actually Apple is doing something similar, and it's opt-in.
If you have a contact, they are in their settings, and they're nearby and they can see your wifi network, a prompt will appear on your phone which asks if you would like to share wifi credentials with them.
There's some foolery going on to stop it popping up if you're using the device normally, like you have to be in settings or the home screen - or recently unlock your phone or something... But it's very explicitly: opt-in.
It's opt in for the person with the option to share network credentials.
It's not opt-in for the owner of the network, who should really have a say in the matter.
I do use this feature from time to time, but it's typically on networks where either I'm the owner, or the owner's given me permission to share the creds.
This also opens up an attack surface (which I got to experience firsthand on a burner device at DEF CON 31), where someone spoofs an Apple device requesting network creds. The attack itself involves spamming share requests and catching you off guard, causing you to hit OK, or you just hit OK out of notification fatigue.
Why? It’s literally just a shortcut for asking for the password from someone who already has it and then having it read it out loud or texted. If the owner of the network doesn’t want that happening they need to explain that in either case.
It’s a shortcut that deprives the network owner of agency. As the person running the network, should you not have some degree of control over who gets to join your network, be it fully open, fully closed, or anywhere in between?
Use RADIUS then. If you told someone the password, they can share it
You have that control: allowlist individual devices
It doesn’t, they have exactly as much agency as they would if the shortcut didn’t exist.
If you want more control than a shareable password provides, it’s on you to implement something other than a shareable password. A feature that merely helps people share passwords doesn’t change that.
If you need control over who joins your network, implement 802.1x or a captive portal or something. If you just use a WPA key, people will always share them, you can't stop them, there are literally crowdsourced online databases of "free internet" WiFi keys
How does it change the network owners ability to decide who gets to join their network?
The guests could already simply tell each other the password
It reminds me a bit of how Waze or Google Maps would end up using access roads as shortcuts with navigation. You let a couple of people use it because you know them. They might tell a few others. Then big tech just sees it as "other people use it, so I'll use it". And now you have no control over your road anymore.
How does this work? Isn't there any verification done through iCloud or something? I don't expect my phone to know about all my contacts' iphone identifiers.
I just tried this the other day with my cousin's wife whose phone number I don't have stored in my contacts and it didn't offer to share the wifi password until we both added each other's number.
Too fucking bad for them. This opt-out bullshit for everything like this, marketing emails, etc. is bullshit. I’m sick of it.
Don't forget the website cookie popup tomfoolery, where you must study each and every popup carefully lest you click the wrong button to opt out.
...and they NEVER remember your preferences, well except your shopping preferences which will stick to you across networks and devices.
Computers were opt in.
Until they weren't.
Yeah, widespread adoption will do that to things.
Unfortunately, depending on country the same legal rules that make SSID mapping legal without any requirements for opt out are also rules that protect your freedom in other ways[1].
The proper way would be to design the protocol so that the identification information is useless in addition to disabling SSID broadcast.
That would of course mean that joining a device to network would be way harder unless you enabled at least network name broadcasting, which enables tracking again.
[1] under polish law, majority [2] of uses of received broadcast/shared public medium signal, is automatically legal. The only provision of privacy is encryption of said signal, because it's treated like shouting the information in public space.
Bypassing encryption is what turns it into unlawful violation of privacy.
[2] for historical reasons there's a mess involving radio&TV tax which was supposed to be paid per receiver, a bit like UK TV license.
This just reminds me of my theory of Microsoft's checklist-driven development: Some PM writes down some single-sentence description of a feature (e.g. "Share Wi-Fi passwords with contacts") and the developers just read the list and find the single least-effort way of implementing it. Once done, they can tick the item off the list and go home having done their job, although often in the most excruciatingly stupid way by damaging their users' experience. I do not see how else could M$ so often add features in a way that actively make their products worse to use.
Because this is Microsoft we shall apply Gates' razor and must thus conclude that "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice".
Can you elaborate why you would see Gates as a malicious actor?
This is a difficult question to answer without knowing whether your Bill Gates context includes his years at Microsoft, or only as a philanthropist with sketchy friends.
If the former, you'll need to present an argument that Microsoft did not hold back the entire industry for 20 years with low quality products, severe user-hostility, and monopolistic practices.
If the latter, you should read up about the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s.
Monopolistic actions are malicious, if you believe in free markets. Gates led the war against Netscape, for one. The setback to the industry and consumers was massive.
Anti-market behavior is today completely normalized, so Gates is very much not alone. Malice is not an unusual phenomenon.
What you're thinking of is called Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from Malice"
OP didn't mistake anything, this would be a public office clerk and they don't have private jets nor yachts.
I believe you mean Hanlon's Razor?
They've inverted it ironically to attribute malice to Microsoft. (Not undeservedly.)
Please refrain from content-free meming on HN.
I like this term, hopefully it enters dictionary. Stupidity doesn't buy yachts, vile malice does.
I do wonder of is partially not caused by the fact that underneath, Outlook and Exchange aren't massively using SMTP or MIME, they use MAPI which is built around X.400 even if it's no longer available to run Exchange work external X.400 connectivity.
Take that background, and how MAPI essentially prioritises internal email capabilities, and slowly a perfect storm for creation of such misfeatures emerges.
Internally to a corporation, in Outlook/MAPI/Exchange way richer world, implementing such a feature is both simple and possibly easy more useful (less annoying emails to write when you want to just give a short reaction).
But then you hit two confounding factors - systems outside of corporate Exchange server - so instead of using a richer messaging feature you make it into extra text message - and systemd outside the corporate, where your message now leaks out.
This way you can start with reasonably well thought out user story, and end with crap like the way reactions work - and weird extra headers
2001(?) I got an email from a client and it said "Debbie would like to revoke the earlier email". Might not have said 'revoke' but something like that. And there were a lot of extra headers I hadn't seen before. After some questioning, I got that they'd just installed some Exchange server setup (or whatever the direct predecessor was?) and you could undo email. But the 'undo' was to send an email revoking the earlier one. MAPI/internal clients understood it; to external clients like me, it was just another email. I'm not sure they (the client) quite understood that they couldn't 'undo' emails to me, because they could do it just fine to everyone else (inside the company).
I'm stealing the term Checklist-driven development. Combined with Cha Bu Duo it explains so much of what I see on a daily basis...
Lazy technical managers (incomplete specification) combined with lazy developers (does not improve specification) and task completion count based performance evaluation (implies atomic task allocation with strictly < 1w time estimation) is the devil, not Lucifer.
And they are everywhere.
This is why PM’s are supposed to work with Business Analysts. Unfortunately, most companies do not have BA’s because, you know, cost. And, most PM’s are not technical and have no engineering background or experience.
This was a good feature. Thankfully it still exists in iOS. Just requires approval.
The iOS implementation of this feature is perfect.
It isn't perfect if you are the wifi owner and people who have credentials then give it away to people you'd rather not give credentials.
It's still perfect, because guests can share passwords verbally or in writing too. Not supporting a digital password share just means the sharing will happen another way.
It's still an improvement though.
In the iOS way, your guest can share the creds privately to another person.
In the normal way, your guest can share the creds verbally to another person, which might be overheard by other unintended listeners.
I guess the ideal would be to allow the network owner (which would be determined by what method?) to share to guests with a flag set for no further sharing (and no viewing of credentials).
It’s cool but it’s not perfect.
I usually try to use this feature when traveling: either I or my wife will add the new Wi-Fi and share with the other. It works roughly 3/4 times, but the remaining 1/4 is infuriating because there’s no button to manually start the sharing and no info about why it doesn’t work.
I would prefer a reliable button to AirDrop the Wi-Fi credentials instead of unreliable magic.
No it isn't, it leaks data to Apple whether you opt in or not.
Or banish machines running Microsoft software from the network.
Sure, Jan.
Holy crap that's amazingly bad!
Apple does it right: it shares only if you press the button and only with your own devices (the share prompt will show up if your other device is currently facing Wi-Fi password prompt and your current device knows the password)
Tasteless describes pretty much every about Microsoft