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I've been on the fence for this one as I think it's a two-edged sword.

One the one hand it's a useful way showing someone you saw their todos and appreciate it. Not everything warrants a written comment.

But on the other hand, it's so easy those claps can quickly lose their meaning. And only a lack of claps remains meaningful, but in a bad way.

It wouldn't be too hard to run an experiment for a few weeks and see what happens. It's a relatively easy feature to build. (We actually experimented with this same idea, but only available through the chat. So the foundation is already built).

What if you add a small set of icons to show "reactions", like the one's at FB?

Yeah those those are fun, but also have their downsides. Basecamp wrote a great article about it: Introducing Boosts: an all-new way to show your support in Basecamp

Their approach is quite interesting too. I prototyped it for WIP, but eventually settled on regular comments.

But it's definitely something we can explore. We could have one type of reaction (👏), multiple types (e.g. 👏 😍 😢 🎉), or allow any emoji like Slack has:

Here's the shortlist used by GitHub

Fyi, the 👍&👎 emojis are used as vote counters and their sums are directly made available from the API

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