😀 Popup menu for detailed emoji reactions

[JFWooten4]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Body

In the spirit of #3082, I propose expanding emoji display functionality. Today, the website only displays about the first 7 users to react with an emoji, ending with "and more" for all other usernames. Additionally, it displays only plaintext handles, which are hard to parse.

I'd like to see something closer to Discord, where you can click the names of reactors to open a pop-up window. So, for clarity, this would not change what happens when clicking to add an emoji. It would just open a new screen when clicking the name of anyone who reacted with a specific emoji.

I would like to see, at minimum, (i) PFPs next to reactor usernames and (ii) the ability to filter by reaction. This would be instrumental for us because a number of DAOs I'm in use emoji reactions for voting. Transparency and reviewability are 100 times easier when you use profiles.

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[mohammadrezwankhan]

The data needed for this UI already exists; the current limitation is mostly presentation and pagination.

For issues and pull-request comments, GitHub’s reactions REST API returns each reaction’s user, content, and timestamp, and supports both content=<emoji> and per_page/page. For Discussions, the GraphQL reactions connection exposes the same per-reaction data and accepts a content filter; see Discussions in the GraphQL API.

A popup could therefore open only after the user clicks a particular emoji, fetch that emoji’s list lazily, and paginate it rather than loading every reactor up front. The useful details would be avatar, login, display name, and timestamp, with keyboard navigation and an accessible count. It should respect the same visibility/blocking rules as the underlying comment and avoid turning a reaction into a public voter roll by default.

That preserves the existing one-click reaction behavior while adding a discoverable “who reacted with this emoji?” view. For DAO-style voting, the popup should also make clear that reactions are not a tamper-proof ballot; a project that needs binding votes should use an explicit issue/poll workflow with its own eligibility and audit rules.