Consider adding an option to disable reactions

As someone who suffers from social anxiety (and other funny similar phobia/syndromes/whatever), emoji reactions often turn out being quite troublesome to me. My request is to consider the addition of an option in Riot's settings that would allow the whole emoji reaction feature (both sending and displaying) to be turned off. Since I know that, although this issue is really incapacitating to me, my request is also very specific to a small amount of users, the default value for this option would be to enable the reaction feature.

Here's some more context. There are three types of situations involving reactions I can find myself in.

The first one is when I can easily get what someone meant when reacting to a message, whether it's a :+1: on a suggestion/proposal someone made (usually outside of a debate) or a :tada: on an achievement someone have announced, or something similar. The goal of the reaction very rarely concerns and/or interests me, and I tend to consider this information, though nice to see, as not important (since I can't get binged anyway).

The second type of situations is when I can't understand what someone meant with a reaction. There are some emojis, even in Riot Web's small 6-pieces set, which I'm either not sure or have no idea what a reaction with it means. And when, whether it's because of the context or the reaction in itself, I can't understand it, it's as if I was being shut off from a whole part of the conversation, and can feel quite excluded and isolated.

The third type of situations is when I'm having a debate with someone, and someone not previously involved in it either reacts negatively to one of my comments or reacts positively to the other party's comment. While obviously not ill-intentioned, this kind of interactions have the same effect to me as if the person came up to me and said "you have no place in this discussion, your opinion is utter crap and it's worth so little that it's not even worth me arguing against it". Adding to the fact that I, by nature, don't like to engage in such discussions (because of an irrational fear of this kind of reactions) but sometimes force myself to do so because I truly think that I can help the project and the team go in the right direction and that my opinion is worth something, it makes me feel so violently shut off from the whole discussion, somewhat alienated and rejected from the group that was involved in it, that it usually ends up in small-scale panic attacks on my end (one of which happened just today for this very reason), which require me to take something like a whole exhausting hour off to even calm myself down (which differs from recovering from it, which takes much more time). In this type of situations, I also quit the debate immediately, not because I don't think I have anything to bring to the table but because I feel very unwelcome in it, and usually refrain from engaging in similar discussions for quite some time (which is sometimes very incapacitating, e.g. when spec was involved and one of the tasks I'm now supposed to be working on involve spec changes).

In summary, what emoji reaction brings me, when it brings me something at all, is information that is never important and rarely interesting, most times an unpleasant feeling of confusion and/or exclusion, and on some not-so-rare times actually harmful consequences. I know that this kind of use cases and request is quite unusual, which is why I took it upon myself to provide a detailed explanation of the impact this feature has on me (which is not the kind of things I enjoy talking about, for reasons I think may be clear by now) and possibly other people. Now I'm starting to be afraid of engaging in interesting and meaningful discussions, and I even start anticipating in a bad way seeing a reaction popping up on a message. If I could make it all go away by flicking a switch in Riot's settings, it would immensely improve my life and moods on a daily basis.

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating Riot's settings implementation and the existing emoji-reaction handling in the relevant client, then determine how both sending and displaying reactions are controlled. Done means an opt-in setting disables both behaviors while reactions remain enabled by default.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.