User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: August 17, 2016/@comment-24473195-20160818122143

> We are launching a 4-week test of a prototype feature, Appreciation.

Sounds a lot like Extension:Thanks. I think it will be successful as long as "thanks" are ephemeral,  aren't stored in logs, and eventually purged from the database. It certainly shouldn't be possible for someone to point to a log and brag that 50 people have thanked them for their contribution, especially when one could be theoretically be thanked for vandalising a page.

In fact, I would suggest  not making the same mistake as the Thanks extension, and generalizing this extension by making it have the ability to send specific developer defined notices rather than only "appreciation". One issue is that many users misuse and abuse the "talk pages" / message walls to send warnings, to notify someone about vandalism,  to request deletions, and plenty of other non-discussion uses.

Instead of abusing  talk pages, this seems like the perfect time to build a proper workflow for this. For example, instead of reverting an edit, you could send a notification advising a user to either justify their edit (in case it is completely justified) or do the revert themselves.