Reactions
I remember when I first saw the reactions bar on Buzzfeed I thought it was brilliant.
It’s such a simple idea, but it reflected something I had noticed in my own blogging for quite some time: People are often unsure of what to say in a comment and therefore chose to leave nothing at all. I’ve found over the years that the posts I find most interesting tend to have the fewest comments and the ones that I jot off quickly get loaded up. I can only assume that’s because it’s easier to react to a half though than a full one. It’s for that reason that I love the way they handle things over at Buzzfeed, by offering people pre-packaged reactions you get them to engage with the content without necessarily having to put their neck out and come up with anything interesting to say. Not surprisingly (because they’re smart and share a co-founder), Huffington Post has a similar feature:
But today I ran into one I liked most of all over at Newser. Theirs combines the reaction with a poll:
I categorize all these things in the bucket of turning content consumption into an act of content creation, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Good stuff.