5 ms·

It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There

• cholantesh 10y ago
  Emojis are stunningly ugly to me, though I did appreciate throwing out the custom doge and Doom space marine ones at random when my team used Slack.
  • zamalek 10y ago
    I find that they're often too cutesy or overstated. In Whatsapp for example, they come across as incredibly flirtatious.
    • georgespencer 10y ago
      The winking smile should be jokey but I can only interpret it as flirty nowadays ;)
      • jharger 10y ago
        I use the winking with tongue sticking out to mean a joke... but I don't know if everyone else interprets it that way ;) (that was a flirty wink)
      • kbenson 10y ago
        Since I alternate between the smile and winking smile about evenly, you're making me reconsider my past text conversations. ;)
  • Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    I think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible. Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.
    • rdiddly 10y ago
      The smiley is an efficient general-purpose abstraction of reality; the emoji is a million instances of copy-pasted overly-specific code.
      • jobigoud 10y ago
        Emojis are in Unicode. They aren't parsed or converted to multiple glyphs anymore, the text editor will provide them directly. http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that. Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.
        • calt 10y ago
          There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/
          • 10y ago
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Kyle McLaughlan explains a former project: https://ello.co/codenamesarah/post/s9dx9cx_iw6ytktbugjwmq https://ello.co/codenamesarah/post/s9dx9cx_iw6ytktbugjwmq
    • cholantesh 10y ago
      Emauj'ib
• katurian 10y ago
  I'm with you. I put a space between the : and the ) to prevent the graphic emoji : )
  • Diederich 10y ago
    Going the other way often works too! (:
    • jschulenklopper 10y ago
      Which looks like a bald person without a mouth to me :-) Somehow I've become accustomed to 'read' emoji as tilting your head to the left. Turning the emoji around always reminds me of German books, which often have the title upside down on the book spine compared to English / Dutch books.
  • jazzyb 10y ago
    Pasting bash snippets into chat is so frustrating when clients try to render emojis :/
    • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Fortran also suffers from this problem: real, intent(in) :: f(:,:,:)
  • soundwave106 10y ago
    That automatic emoji concept can be quite annoying sometimes. For instance, Outlook 365 will automatically turn "B)" into the "smiling face with sunglasses" emoji. I cannot fathom this use case. Apparently someone at Microsoft thought that things like, oh, a fairly common styling of a simple lettered list (A) Do this B) Do that C) Etc.) and parenthesized words / sentences ending in capital B (abbreviations will get you there, like say BBB) are not very common in corporate communication. The need for a smiling face sunglasses clad emoji was much stronger. Go figure.
• sippeangelo 10y ago
  My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it. Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions. Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.
  • johnward 10y ago
    Try sending a code snippet in any modern chat
    • jaflo 10y ago
      Telegram is pretty good with that. One ` for inline code, three for blocks of code.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • esnard 10y ago
      Actually Skype is great with code.: just prefix your message with "!! ", or surround it with triple backticks, and it will treat it as code. Triple backticks also works in WhatsApp.
  • wyager 10y ago
    The worst is if you are trying to do a letter-indexed list of items and B) gets coverted to a guy with sunglasses.
    • 83457 10y ago
      J
• lips 10y ago
  My workaround is a nose :^)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• more_original 10y ago
  It's somewhat amusing that even the first IBM PC had a smiley character. It's character number 1, no less (in code page 437). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]