Carbon has 2 methods of reacting to a post or comment – Upvotes and Reacts.

Upvotes (and downvotes) help to sort the posts for all users. It works a little like Reddit. If a post receives a lot of upvotes, it moves up the feed in its topic and also in the global feed and follow feed.

Reacts simply allow you to publicly react to a post. For example you might upvote a post, and then react with a sad emoji. This could show you appreciate the post, but the content made you sad.

The combination of these methods of reacting results in a good quality feed for all users, as well as allowing everyone to react appropriately without punishing the post creator.

Reacts (the emojis) do not affect a post or comment’s performance – only the upvotes/downvotes do.