relikes.com• Jul 17, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: Re:Likes – open-source library to be particular about reactions to textHi HN,For a long time I have been perplexed, why is that when we interact with text content like articles or blog posts on social media, we are expected to react to them in their entirety – either like the whole post, or dislike the whole post; agree with the whole post or disagree with the whole post. A post may contain multiple ideas we agree or disagree with independently, yet we are forced to generalize.What our interaction could be like, if reactions could be attached only to particular selected parts of the text instead? Using classic reactions like buttons or emojis all over the text seemed like a dead end idea as even imagining it can make one's eyes hurt. But there's a traditional and universally understood way of text selection – marker-style highlighting. What if we simply convert such selection into a reaction? Not only highlighted parts can represent individual reactions, they also can be naturally aggregated into heatmaps, so besides expressing their own attitude, users a