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Why are users force-fed with stuff like the “hovering emoji toolbar” in Teams?

11 points by acadapter ↗ HN
I mean, it's not an ad or something that brings revenue to them. I try to CTRL-C something in a message, and I'm met with a toolbar full of smileys on top of what I'm focusing on.

What's the incentive to make this annoying thing mandatory for so many people? I can change font size and style, but not this.

An ad would actually be less annoying than someone trying to modify my way of communicating with others. "Here, have a smiley-face! Are you sure you don't want a smiley-face on that? Come on, put a smiley on your colleague's message!"

9 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] thread
db48x
Perhaps you should consider using software that you can actually change.
lookalike74
Thank you! Many of MS's 'productivity tools' are unwanted interruptions you have to Google (not Bing) to learn how to turn off. It's just ridiculous.
arethuza
Aren't those the various options for how you react to messages in Teams?
Gunax
I cannot talk specifically, but it's likely (ime) down to metrics.

Someone somewhere is incentivised to increase the number of people using emojis. Or someone ran the numbers and realises users who use emojis are more likely to continue using the app.

ffhhj
> incentivised to increase the number of people using emojis

It's the best way MS deviced to collect emotional data to train their AI.

DarthNebo
More irritating than this is the fact that it will automatically show you as a way if Teams is not the active window after 10mins. Which kind of beats the purpose of using Teams as means to stay connected and share availability with your team. Hence making it futile to guess if someone is actually away or not, by having to ask every time.
Qem
My workplace switched to Teams as official chat app and I'm disheartened. It's user hostile and a resource hog.
luckman212
Slack is also a resource hog.

And ALL chat apps are "user hostile" if you value your sanity and ability to concentrate on a task for more than 5 minutes without a cool animated GIF breaking your flow.

marto1
If I have to be perfectly honest Teams gets me 90% *there* in terms of functionality as far as corporate shenanigans is concerned at least. But MS is MS and they generally follow a pattern of creating something generally cool(coming from an isolated team somewhere probably) and then making it worse and worse until most users scream.

The one for me was that when typing ``` it detected it as a code quote so it was really nice for posting code in chat, etc. Now it doesn't work. You have to click the formatting option; click the code quote icon; click Code from the dropdown; Click your language from the second dropdown.

My guess is it was disabled, because it got too many novice users confused, but damn it click, click, click, click..