My friends and I have been using Goblin Mode for over a month now. At first there was no way to interact with others at all. You could update your status and read the ones from your friends. That felt okay but we somehow thought that at least a bit of interaction could be a good addition.
Then I added likes which resulted in an significantly improved experience. People felt a little better connected to their friends. The problem quickly became that likes are a bit one-dimensional. You don’t want to “like” that somebody has a bad day.
So I took the chance and replaced likes with reactions while refactoring the whole thing. Reactions are basically the same list of tags you can add to your status updates but you can now use them to add one as a little piece of communication to somebody else’s status.
On the one hand this enables to react with better fitting communication-nuggets. On the other hand it enables micro-humour by allowing people to search for and react with funny reactions. Stuff like “This is my step count, what’s yours?” is now possible as well.
Based on the two days since this feature was released I’d say that the overall amount of interactions has decreased while the quality has increased. Receiving a reaction is far more valuable than only receiving a generic like.
Next up: Image attachments.