How Hug or Shrug works

Hug or Shrug lets you express preferences about food, brands, places, entertainment and everyday experiences. React to a specific subject, see the community response and build a collection of your own preferences.

1. Choose an honest reaction

Hug means you like the subject. Shrug means it is not for you. Want to Try records curiosity. Never Tried records lack of experience, and Don’t Know records unfamiliarity. Neither unfamiliarity choice is a dislike.

Browse topics to choose a subject, or start a guest reaction session. Check the title: liking a particular product does not automatically mean liking every product from its brand.

2. Read results with their sample size

Public results count reactions set to public or anonymous statistics. Private, friends-only and followers-only reactions are excluded. Guest choices remain on your browser and do not increase public totals.

Reaction distributions need ten qualifying reactions. A Hug-versus-Shrug split needs ten Hug or Shrug opinions and uses only those two choices as its denominator. These are preferences from people who chose to participate, not a survey representative of the population. Early counts can be useful without a percentage.

3. Save your taste profile

An account saves your reactions across devices. Guest choices can be imported after signing in. Your new profile starts private, and public discovery is disabled until you choose otherwise. Change individual reaction visibility and profile settings to control what others can see.

4. Compare actual shared subjects

Compatibility uses reactions to the same listings. Agreement, disagreement and curiosity have different weights; Never Tried and Don’t Know do not count as positive or negative preferences. A headline compatibility percentage requires at least three shared meaningful reactions. More overlapping reactions provide more context; a fixed number of total reactions never guarantees a match.

The twenty-reaction challenge lets you share a link containing those twenty choices. Anyone with that link can compare against them. Sharing the challenge is separate from changing your profile’s visibility.

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