Great Artists Steal

On reinventing the wheel

On some level, this week’s installment is an opportunity for me to vent. Though I think there’s enough of a thoughtful lesson that I don’t feel too guilty about it.

For all my enthusiasm about the tech world, I can be a surprising luddite at times. Try as I might, I can’t bring myself to maintain my shopping list in a digital medium. When I need to restock my kitchen, I write down what I need on a sheet of paper and bring it with me to the store.

So too have I been a laggard with emoji. It’s taken me longer than it should have to accept they’re part of the way we communicate, and indeed are actually pretty useful.

In particular, I’ve become a really big fan of the emoji reactions that many systems have adopted. If you’ve used Slack or WhatsApp, you should know what I’m talking about. When you post a message, people can add a reaction via an emoji. Maybe you react with ➕ to indicate you’re voting in favor of something, or you react with 😌 when someone lets the broader team know you’ve fixed an urgent bug.

It’s a really useful way to engage with something that doesn’t need a long reply in actual text.

And really, when I say “many systems have adopted,” what I really mean is that basically everyone has adopted except Apple’s Messages application and, by extension, iMessage.

With every passing day, Apple’s seeming unwillingness to follow the herd irritates me more and more. I want more than the six reactions they’ve built in — the thumbs up and down, “ha ha,” heart, double bang, and question mark — so I can express a richer set of feelings. And I want it in iMessage because that’s where, for a complicated mix of reasons, my most important conversations tend to take place.

Even Apple’s most recent nod to this has been both weird and inconsistent. The implementation is not what you want — that is, the way every other chat software I use works — and it’s not even consistently applied. As I write this, the new “react with emoji as a sticker,” feature doesn’t work on the Mac version of Messages. Even when it does, the results can be underwhelming. (See, for example, my friend reacting to my message and the reactions covering the text of the message.)

And this is where I see a perhaps deeper theme. Being original is great. It’s the story of my life. But sometimes the best path is the least inventive.

First, there can be real value in copying the way everyone else does something. Even if it’s not “the best” way to do something, it can be useful to follow the herd simply because you don’t have to spend all the time re-educating people.

That can apply just as much to the implementation of an emoji reaction feature as it can to, say, a software framework choice.

If Apple simply copied the emoji reaction feature that hundreds of millions of other people already use in, say, WhatsApp, people will see the benefits immediately. They can apply what they’re already doing in WhatsApp to Messages.

I don’t know that Django is the “best” framework to use for building a product. If I were asked, I could list many reasons I’d prefer to use something else. At the same time, it’s incredibly popular. You’ll probably have an easier time finding people to work on your system — or need to train them less — if you make that choice instead of something that, from a purely technical perspective, is better.

Second, this Apple-emoji problem is a great illustration of how you might think about how much better something needs to be to justify originality.

The solutions that Apple has offered so far aren’t as good as — let alone better than — the version everyone else has implemented. The six “blessed” reactions that work the way most other platforms’ do are too limited. The implementation of a broader set is decidedly inferior to the way the herd has chosen to implement this feature.

If Apple wants to be original here, they need to come up with something that’s much, much better.

So too with basically anything else. I’m not going to rip out my existing Postgres database for something that’s 5% faster. I’d need it to be multiple times as fast, or offer some other benefit in terms of flexibility or query complexity. I’m not going to switch away from Salesforce for something that only has a fraction of the features, even if the user interface is a lot less gummed up with two decades of cruft.

If you have the ear of anyone inside the mothership, I’d love to add to the chorus of people asking for an emoji reaction implementation that rips off Slack or WhatsApp or Signal in the most brazen, obvious way possible. They’ve all done it. It works really well.

Being original is great. Sometimes, though, it makes sense to follow the herd.

Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.