Replied to Thumbs Up 👍 by Wouter Groeneveld* (Brain Baking)*

Don’t you hate it when that happens? You compose a targeted question, re-iterate the sentence a few times to make sure it is easy to interpret, press send, only to get a thumbs up in response?

Over on Brain Baking, Wouter Groeneveld offered a critique of the thumbs up reaction emoji, noting correctly that it is an *at best *ambiguous response to substantive messages. I largely agree with his general critique of emojis and emoji reactions: “Instead of adding context, by, you know, using words, like these, emojis manage to strip even more context, sometimes paradoxically by adding layers of confusion.” (I will however note that I have recognized the potential power of emojis to tell stories.) With that being said, I do think the *thumbs up *reaction has *limited use. *I have to use Microsoft Teams (thumbs down) for my day job. It tends not to be too chatty. In my case I receive assignments or answers to my questions about assignments. I sometimes use the thumbs up reaction as short-hand for *acknowledged, **understood, *or *will do. *I even drop the occasional thumbs up in real life. I can endorse thumbs up (or similar, maybe the checkmark) for limited use cases to avoid unnecessarily cluttering a chat. (I submit for the record, however, that there is *no use *for *lol *or rofl.)