That's definitely an alternative, I almost did it that way!
I went with 'forgive' because I think the broader problem we have on social media is when looking across all users, it can be really ambiguous what things mean, which has led to a lot of misinterpretation of intent. The people entering the worldwide commons of Twitter are from every life stage, skill level, opinion tribe, culture, personality type, etc, and the tools we've used to find common ground among all of us in the past - language - is being thrown out in favor of hieroglyphs and UI structures that can be pretty ambiguous for a lot of people.
Adding ambiguity can be fun and quite useful in certain circumstances, especially with new things where the goal is to create emergent behavior. But for important things that strike at the core of who we are and have deep psychological impact, I'd prefer to see those rooted in specific meaning and intent. Concepts like forgiveness and mercy are things that span almost every culture throughout history and are part of the glue that tie us together, so I figured its probably better to be extra clear about that.
I also like to use design proposals to push people to think a bit, make them wrestle with things that sound silly because they're so straightforward, rather than just hand wave it (my other recent work on Spaces [0] is an example of this). But in this particular case, I loved the clarity of it. I do think it's worth further exploration and discussion tho!
I went with 'forgive' because I think the broader problem we have on social media is when looking across all users, it can be really ambiguous what things mean, which has led to a lot of misinterpretation of intent. The people entering the worldwide commons of Twitter are from every life stage, skill level, opinion tribe, culture, personality type, etc, and the tools we've used to find common ground among all of us in the past - language - is being thrown out in favor of hieroglyphs and UI structures that can be pretty ambiguous for a lot of people.
Adding ambiguity can be fun and quite useful in certain circumstances, especially with new things where the goal is to create emergent behavior. But for important things that strike at the core of who we are and have deep psychological impact, I'd prefer to see those rooted in specific meaning and intent. Concepts like forgiveness and mercy are things that span almost every culture throughout history and are part of the glue that tie us together, so I figured its probably better to be extra clear about that.
I also like to use design proposals to push people to think a bit, make them wrestle with things that sound silly because they're so straightforward, rather than just hand wave it (my other recent work on Spaces [0] is an example of this). But in this particular case, I loved the clarity of it. I do think it's worth further exploration and discussion tho!
[0] https://nickpunt.com/blog/spaces/