Re: The road to hell...
Yes. Usenet didn't have "reactions" and its social norms somewhat discouraged non-contributing "me too" or no-content flame posts (more so on moderated groups, of course), and somehow many of us managed to communicate.
Reactions are tempting for readers, because we're social creatures with an instinct to share our emotional state; but in asynchronous communication, where there's no interactive adjustment to linguistic footing, their main effects are to promote in-group/out-group distinctions and competition for attention.1
While we're at it, I'd like to see discussion forums that block emoji. The initial popularity of emoji among ideographic language users2 is understandable, but they've become a way for writers to avoid diction, style, and the expression of nuance. Lowering the cognitive load of communication is not necessarily a good thing.3
1I alluded to some of these effects in the piece on Usenet I wrote for Works and Days in 1994, and others made similar observations in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century as online communication proliferated. And of course there are a couple of millennia or so of various rhetorical traditions that analyzed the different affordances and effects among interpersonal speech, oratory, private writing, and publication.
2"Emoji" literally means "picture-writing".
3One of the consequences of hand-writing letters in ink was that writers had to consider things like orthography, pragmatics, and layout while writing, because erasing was difficult or impossible and alternatives such as striking out text were aesthetically unpleasant (and showed a lack of forethought). The ability to freely edit text while composing on a computer has different affordances, and offers different use cases; people today write far more than they did a hundred years ago, for example. But it has worked against careful writing.