Signal Polls: Yes, no, maybe (yes!)
33 points by confusedalex
33 points by confusedalex
I'm surprised at how negative a bunch of comments about this have been. I've had use cases for them and had to do reaction-based fudges. I've read people want to switch WhatsApp groups to Signal but need polls. And if you don't need or want them, they're easy to ignore.
Meredith Whittaker has spoken about how they also received negative feedback about the stories feature. It usually comes from a predominantly western and/or Silicon Valley-centric audience, but stories were built to entice a non-Western market for whom it's an essential feature. To be honest, I initially had a similar negative reaction to stories so this was eye opening to me.
Personally it annoyed me, but only and only because there's one thing I really want and saw a lot of people also want: replying with stickers, which isn't implemented for whatever reason yet they do this. Polls itself are fine but I saw way more complaints about Signal not having sticker replies yet nothing was done with that. (It's mostly just a small pet peeve tho, but I feel that functionality is way more requested than polls lol)
I used to work at Signal. Know that I lobbied for reply-with-sticker but it never happened. I hope, one day, someone resurrects our shared dream.
I wouldn't be so sure. I personally know what a poll is but not a sticker in this context.
Fair, maybe it's just in my circle. I've often (or rather, more often, cus I haven't seen it a lot, but I did see it) seen complaints about replying with stickers rather than about polls, but yeah that might just be near me lol. (Sticker is basically like a big, custom emoji? could maybe be called a "quick access photo" you can send quickly from menu maybe)
I'm not sure if I get you. Replying-with-stickers is something else?
Yes replying with stickers is different, currently you can select a message to which you can reply to, but you can't reply to it using a sticker, it just gets sent like a regular message. So what I usually do is reply to a message with a dot and then send a sticker so it's known that the sticker is a reaction to a selected message.
Can you describe how replying with a sticker is different from replying with a message that only contains a sticker? Are you instead wanting sticker reactions?
Replying is when you select a specific message that, for example, was sent a long time ago, and then you reply to it. Then your message has a reference to a message you are replying to. But you are not able to do it with stickers, stickers are being sent without that reference, so you can't reply to a message that was sent a long time ago with a sticker.
Wow, that's really surprising to me that it doesn't work. Thank you for clarifying! I've only experienced stickers outside of Signal (Cheogram Android, specifically), and there a sticker is treated like any emoji (you can even react with a sticker).
I’ve read this post and six replies and I still don’t know what this feature means or would look like. In contrast, polls exist on a load of platforms that overlap with Signal in usage and so I know exactly what they mean.
On platforms that also utilize stickers (eg. telegram, discord, whatsapp), replying (aka, referencing a previously sent message by someone or yourself) with a sticker is fairly common. It's not just some niche thing, since a load of platforms that overlap with Signal in usage also do this. Like I said it's mostly my pet peeve, not some critical issue I have, but it def is an annoyance for a lot of people, there are github issues and reddit posts about it as well. If you don't care about it or know what it means then that's fine, but lack of it IS pretty specific to Signal, like polls were
I used Signal a few years ago to do some political organization. Having a polling feature would have helped us a lot. I introduced some others folks to this feature yesterday when it came out: my parents. Who are you? was the question, with the options Mom and Dad. The outcome was 50/50 with one abstention, so the experiment was a success.
The UX is a little wonky right now, but polls are great and my group chats have already used them for both jokes and serious questions. Very glad they're here.