But I think the use of reactions for such a negative purpose should be discouraged in the first place, as I can hardly visualise negative reactions leading to constructive consequences, and I'd argue that keeping users aware of the possibility of reactions being recognized as plain `Like`s is actually good for health of communities. If you want to express disagreement with an opinion, it would be more productive to argue against it with your own words or simply share counterarguments if somebody else has already made ones,

instead of just throwing a 👎 emoji. If you want to have a vote, you can use the `Question` activity. Also, Reddit-style downvotes are commonly implemented with the `Dislike` activity AFAICT, whose semantics is much clearer than arbitrarily chosen emojis.

That said, it'd still be inevitable that some users exploit reactions in an abusive way and we'd need some sort of moderation and filtering mechanisms, [TODO].

(To be clear, this thread is a resurrection of a shelved draft GH issue from >0.5 year ago and it's not written specifically for the FEP)

@tesaguri Many commonly used reactions are neither likes nor dislikes, for example 😡 😕 😢. I think discarding them completely is better than falling back to 'like'

@silverpill I think it's fine to interpret even the 😡 and 😢 reactions as "likes" if they are used as empathy for anger/sorrow of the recipient.
Yes, it's still inevitable that reactions are used for non-like purposes, but I don't think it'd be healthy to completely discard communicational information in fear of misuses, even if they are less informative than replies (unless the user opts into discarding them).
Aiding the intended use is the responsibility of UI and to combating abuses is the responsibility of filtering mechanisms of the receiving server.

@silverpill Well, I might be going to write some thoughts on the SocialHub thread

@tesaguri @silverpill yeah. I feel like expressing reactions *to* a story and interpreting it as a plain like is fine. where it gets washy is trying to use it as a "downvote" or sorts.

but i feel like, since microblogging in general doesnt have the idea of "downvoting", it doesnt have the potential confusion it has with things like reddit or hn clones. its well known that this is, at best, an alternate representation of a like