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Why does the inline react tool require the selection of a unique snippet of text? This is slightly counterproductive sometimes, for example when trying to react to a particular word or phrase with "Taboo those words?" (often times, the reason why I would like to react that way is precisely because that word was used very many times in that comment/post...)
It's related to the technical implementation. Agree it's annoying. It makes it so that we can reliably detect which text the react is supposed to be attached to, because we don't want to modify the actual content data to indicate where the react is, and so we need unique anchors.
We might improve the algorithms here at one point and will then loosen the restriction.
We might improve the algorithms here at one point and will then loosen the restriction.
Being robust to edits in the reacted-to comment seems important, otherwise there is pressure to avoid further edits (which becomes anxiety without advance feedback on if a given edit breaks react placements). Though for posts, the audio already fails to update after edits, motivating avoidance of editing after posting.
Well, it's messy. In many cases you would like the reacts to disappear as you edit the part that was reacted to. This is most obvious in the case of typo reacts, but also for paragraphs that people react to with "disagree" or probability-reacts, you want people's reacts to be invalidated when the paragraph goes through substantial enough revisions.
Most edits should closely preserve intent, especially where there are already replies or reacts, it's more straightforward for such edits. In some other cases it would be more appropriate to reply to a react, and there is no direct way of doing that (which is slightly frustrating and probably feeds the blunt tool of anti-reacting).