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> Simply having those engagement metrics changes peoples’s behavior on those platforms.
I concur.
> My thought is simple - if you have a reaction, you will write a comment even if it’s one word. Otherwise, it’s fine if you read it, nodded along, and moved on. I shouldn’t need to see every reaction.
Yep, exactly. People often give the analogy of reading facial reactions when conversing in person but that doesn’t even scale well to a stage talk, much less to your whole list of followers and potential readers on the whole social network and the Web. It also doesn’t scale in time. Facial reactions are real-time whereas likes and boosts can continue to nag over time.
Hashtags: Yeah, I’m fine with, say, one tag. IIRC Threads has that feature of only allowing one tag per post?
> It’s a good discovery and aggregation tool
What if a social network exposed a search option for whatever words you select in a post? Similar to how browsers have it except in this case it will be for the network.