I hadn't remembered them, so I checked your source... they were text counters with the labels "LOL", "OMG", "EPIC", "CUTE", "WTF", and "FAIL", apparently. If that was the actual implementation, then I can see several things that are different. The YouTube reaction button effort seems, in retrospect, to have made several horrible mistakes. The one that strikes me as a dead-in-the-water kind of mistake was mediating culturally between the commentator and the comment in what was probably a misguided attempt to be appealing.