I am surprised to see a lack of attention to parallels between empathy in a tribal setting and conscientiousness in an individual tribesman in discussions here. It is a scary setting we find ourselves in when we all can be agreeable through sites like Kiva and Kickstarter, neurotic through sites like 4chan and reddit, extroverted through services like Facebook and flickr, open through services like Google; and yet there is not one place that translates in a tribal way to experiencing any form of conscientiousness online today.
I am driven to understand this...
Seeing how you would interpret each icon based on context was an experiment in design.
The last icon is for the "circlejerk": your objective sad face.
This is the part of my reply where i see i should offer more time to collecting hyperlinks for examples, but i hope it follows easily enough:
Relevant xkcd to voting systems: happy button only from me.
Someone saying they got their bike stolen while they were voting: sad button only
Peer-reviewed paper about voting in forums: brain button only
Peer-reviewed paper about the shape of Antarctica: sperm but...
What if our voting system looked something like this, making room for both the enticing subjective vote as well as the democratic objective one? That tweak would fix all my bad voting habits.
I was searching for "We apologize for the inconvenience." I appreciate the way your subjective "better" covers this concept.
edit: After a little reading, I offer a rejoinder: is it better to rely on the labour of intellectual design - of manufactured reactions - than the labour of machines? Or are these two mechanics too similar to parse?
...or something to that effect from someone in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on the scope and possibilities of national politics. Can't find the quote atm.