12 ms·

It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on *oji.

acheron 8y ago
Neal Stephenson may have not gotten the "Metaverse" prediction quite right, but he seems to have nailed "mediaglyphs".
jcfrei 8y ago
Always interesting to see the divergence between HN and what the average user cares about. For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other. I can't think of another linguistic feature in history which saw such widespread use within a decade and I feel like emojis don't get enough credit for that.
- engi_nerd 8y ago
  How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
  - mmphosis 8y ago
    :(
    - engi_nerd 8y ago
      But that's an emoticon, not an emoji.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        It’s a wireframe emoji before it hits the render pupeline.
        Cthulhu_ 8y ago
        Reactmoji
  - nicky0 8y ago
    Because it uses pictures instead of words.
    - stormking 8y ago
      That idea was dismissed several thousand years ago, and for good reason. Text is way more powerful and precise than pictures. And I'm not saying having both is a bad thing, but this focus on Emojis is just idiotic.
      - ovao 8y ago
        Text accompanied by images has been a staple of modern visual communication for the past several hundred years. Emojis just bring additional ways to express oneself in addition to plain text. They augment; they do not replace.
      - kridsdale1 8y ago
        Emotional human conversation is imprecise. Tactical use of that is a skill.
      - wsc981 8y ago
        When I chat with my Thai girlfriend, many miles away, we usually use the LINE app. We don't directly use emoji's, but we do use stickers [0] as part of our chat. And I feel stickers provide much the same use as emojis, the can more easily be used to convey emotions in a chat that would otherwise be harder to interpret correctly. --- [0]: https://store.line.me/stickershop/showcase/top/en https://store.line.me/stickershop/showcase/top/en
        throwaway-hn123 8y ago
        That's one of the main reasons I use Telegram - stickers + emojis + text is far more superior to just text. I feel sorry for some of the emotionally crippled people upstream who are so dismissive of this.
  - dewey 8y ago
    Sometimes I'd like to think that it prevents misunderstandings. But that's probably very subjective. I'd also guess that just because they feature it heavily on the keynote that a huge team spent the whole year only working on just Emojis. That doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of other teams doing important ground work and internal improvements that are not that easy to showcase on a keynote for a very diverse audience and press.
  - mistersquid 8y ago
    My significant other suffers from depression. We are long distance and much of our daily communication is through text-messaging. We both rely on this one emoji to communicate more effectively: <smiling face with squinting eyes> [0] We use others, but that one emoji makes all the difference in the world. Often we send only that single sign to each other. [0] https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ EDIT: Replace emoji with text description and add citation.
    - sologoub 8y ago
      Very curious - what do you think makes the image version superior to the text-based smiley? And as a follow-on, do you think the animated and personalized versions of these emojis make it that much more effective? For me, the text version communicates the same meaning and context, so it’s fascinating to see examples where the representational medium has a significant impact.
      - jodrellblank 8y ago
        This smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes is one of the few emoji that cause an automatic emotional response inside me. Another is https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face/ https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face/ (Apple rendition of both, particularly). Text, and ASCII emoticons, just don't do that. (and I'm guessing that after I see enough "we can save you money on your car insurance :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: manipulative overuse by marketing "humans", emojis won't do it anymore either). (Although, do you genuinely think a photo of a cat being cute is emotionally the same and just as effective as a description of a cat being cute?)
      - pcurve 8y ago
        it's definitely different for everybody. text based ones are limited in range of emotions they can convey. I never understood people that spent money on digital goods until I found kakaotalk emojis. for me there is no comparison. I adore their animated emojis and I'm willing to pay for them as do many others. you can check them out. https://youtu.be/sKCPUfPaJBI https://youtu.be/sKCPUfPaJBI
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    I suspect some people have either never heard of emoji - could be old or young, not sure - or simply didn't think they would use it before these kinds of features came along. Outside of Apple nerd (and broader HN) social circles, the awareness of this is probably much smaller than we realize. After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
  - jcfrei 8y ago
    A major part of human communication happens through facial expressions. Emojis/Animojis enable this for digital communication. It's new in the sense that we now have a global set of symbols for these expressions.
  - ben509 8y ago
    "Whole new way" is a bit hyperbolic, but an emoji definitely brings layers of meaning that are normally only feasible in in-person conversation into the written realm. It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy. It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don't have to explain why you approve or add your own commentary, you just indicate your approval. And if you write a comment on a thread, there's a certain expectation that it contain an original thought or that it demands a response. So reactions manage to avoid a lot of inane filler. For a good illustration, watch a thread on Facebook where they say "type AMEN if you agree!" and you get a thousand people tediously writing it out. If there were just a little prayer emoji and a counter, you get closer to their actual intent, since that's literally what "amen" means.
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      > It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
      - sxg 8y ago
        Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can use. What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.
  - dabockster 8y ago
    I think emojis are better at conveying emotion than straight text, since emotion is a very visual in-the-moment thing.
  - bambataa 8y ago
    A friend asked if he could crash at my place one night and said “don’t worry if not, I got options” followed by the nail-painting emoji. How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?
    - morsch 8y ago
      I wouldn't even know how to express it in words. This may or may not be an example of it -- for all I know it's a commonly used one with a well-established metaphoric meaning --, but I think emoji usage is strangely idiosyncratic.
    - komali2 8y ago
      "hahah, no worries, if you don't come maybe I'll just paint my nails or something"
      - udp 8y ago
        You missed the joke.
        komali2 8y ago
        Did I? Maybe emoticons aren't as universal as we're assuming then ;)
        ripdog 8y ago
        I did too. Perhaps if emoji are such an ambiguous method of communication, they aren't so good after all? That isn't an isolated instance of emoji confusion for me, either. Apart from the basic facial expression emoji, for me they're a great way of making a sentence more confusing.
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      It's hard to say how to express that, since I have absolutely no idea what it means :) If I got that message I would be pretty confused. Is the other option literal nail-painting or is it just sarcasm?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    I don't mean this to sound in any way cruel or judgemental, but a very large proportion of the population have very limited literacy skills. Emoji are useful for all users who are writing short, personal messages that might be ambiguous in tone. They are extremely useful for people who would otherwise struggle to express or understand tone and emotion using the written word. In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that. Here are a couple of example questions from that test. Only 33% of Americans could describe what is expressed in the following poem: "The pedigree of honey Does not concern the Bee - A clover, any time, to him Is Aristocracy" Either a literal or thematic description of the poem constitutes an acceptable answer. Read the text at the link below. After reading this text, only 16% of Americans could describe the purpose of the Se Habla Español expo. https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164 https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164 Acceptable answers include any statement such as the following: "to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community", "to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community" and "to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community". Did you get the right answer? 84% of Americans didn't. Bear that in mind when you're writing documentation or dialog boxes. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-...
    - adventured 8y ago
      > In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that. That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, and who is in the figures (a lot of non-English speaking immigrants), usually to try to prove points. The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at. Over half of China is below basic by the US standard. Over half of Eastern Europe is below the US basic line, including Russia. In the US ~44% of the below basic population are non-native English speakers, who didn't speak English at all prior to starting school. 39% are Hispanic adults. Ie this group overwhelmingly consists of currently or originally low skill, poor immigrants (people that wouldn't even be allowed into most other developed nations such as Canada). Demonstrating that effect in action, 43% of hispanic adults test poorly in literacy, compared to about 10% of white adults. Gee, I wonder if immigration into a new culture + language barrier has something to do with these numbers. Despite a vast immigration flow of low skill, poor, low English literate persons since 1980, the US literacy rate didn't drop meaningfully. That means literacy rates for the base population increased. Despite all of that, the US is the 7th most literate nation on earth, in front of: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel, South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Russia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/08/most-literate-nation-in-the-world-not-the-u-s-new-ranking-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/...
  - fdye 8y ago
    It amuses me to think we have moved from the printed word back to hieroglyphs (emoji). Not in a derogatory way, communication is communication, but in a awe of older cultures. I like the thought experiment of imagining a fallen advanced civilization in Egypt. I imagine them stuck... watching their batteries drop to 0%, and turning to stone and emoji as the only way to persist communication. What if printed words were really just a transitional state of language until their purest form, emoji!
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      To a certain extent, one could consider Chinese characters to be more like emoji than words constructed via a phonetic alphabet, in which case there never really was a transition period, just some backwater outliers.
    - _nosaj 8y ago
      The Ancient Egyptians also used base 2 multiplication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplicatio...
- EpicEng 8y ago
  > For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other Wow that is an extremely generous characterization. At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    If you haven't seen how emojis are used in the wild to enhance communication, it's probably not for you.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      You didn't read. I said that you can convey any of these equally well in ascii. Yes, it's handy to be able to plug an :) at the end of a sentence which may otherwise sound rude/overly direct. That doesn't mean I need 1000 icons, and _that's what we're talking about_.
      - rainbowmverse 8y ago
        I read the whole thing. The emojis serve a purpose. Text doesn't serve that purpose. I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. They're not a stand-in for emoticons. You don't get it. It's okay. Not everything is for you.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        > I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. Consider the possibility that this is because there isn't one.
        rainbowmverse 8y ago
        HN doesn't support emoji, so here's an example: https://cybre.space/@Riley/100149464360818801 https://cybre.space/@Riley/100149464360818801 The meaning is immediately clear to anyone familiar with the reference. It's basically a pictographic language that leans heavily on a shared culture that's largely internet-based.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  maybe that's still not worth a wwdc talk but more like 'obviously we added support for this emoji thing'
- MitjaBezensek 8y ago
  I have yet to see animoji used by anyone outside of Apple events.
- brothercolor 8y ago
  Agreed -- as a Deaf person who uses visual languages to communicate, it's allowed me to actually begin to express myself using a set of pseudo-language visual elements. Some of them roughly map over to ASL expressions; I am looking forward to when they add ASL-specific emoji, or ASL language support, or even hands in the new animoji.
  - komali2 8y ago
    There's no way to say this without being insensitive, but this reminds me of a grade school joke without a punchline - "how do you write in sign-language?" Can you help me better understand what ASL language support would look like or what that would mean to you?
    - exikyut 8y ago
      I'm not deaf, but as per the GP's comment, I can immediately see animojis with hands performing sign gestures. If you consider how ingrained and emotionally significant that expressions in your native language are, animojis with hands - which will take that emotional significance and put a cute spin on it - is going to be massive.
    - gumby 8y ago
      ASL (or any language's sign language) isn't a simple translation of gestures for words or letters; the different sign languages have their own grammars and a different "vocabulary". Think of every sign language user as being bilingual, with a sign language and a written language.
    - baddox 8y ago
      I would imagine that ASL speakers have usage patterns that they would like to express via text messaging without simply “translating” them into formal written English. That’s no different than why English speakers use emoji (“” instead of “I am happy”) or informal onomatopoeia (“uggh” instead of “I am annoyed”).
      - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
- paganel 8y ago
  > I can't think of another linguistic feature in history Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak. > Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings. There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  > For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other Emojis I agree, they are standardized and their meaning is clear by convention. Animojis? That's just salespeak for snapchat-like filters. They're funny but the novelty wears off the same day.
- blt 8y ago
  I suffer from social anxiety. There were a lot of times in the past when I would receive a text and fail to reply because I got stuck trying to figure out how to express myself "correctly". Emojis and the normalization of emoji-heavy texts help me a lot.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
labster 8y ago
Your glob matches moji, which just means "letters". So many bright minds wasted at colleges of Letters and Science, eh?
cdelsolar 8y ago
Emoji are amazing, stop it.
bitL 8y ago
It's fun to develop it - computer vision, facial features detection, 3D mesh deformation - I programmed all those parts for another unrelated app and it was total fun. Not that it was useful or something, but I enjoyed it a lot.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
I'd far rather they do that than try to get people to click on ads.
kalleboo 8y ago
Still beats them wasting their time trying to manipulate minds with either ads or freemium games.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
StephenMelon 8y ago
I think the new Facetime features are gamechangers in terms of driving usage. All this stuff was already available in Snapchat etc. but Snap's problem is that the impressive AR stuff they were doing 3 years ago is now built into the OS. Allowing people to call each other as avatars complete with facial expressions or with flattering filters applied gets rid of one of the last remaining key barriers to mass video calling adoption: people tend to look like hell in low light on front-facing cameras. Teenagers will upgrade to Face ID just to get these features, grandkids will love calling their grandparents as cartoon tigers and grandparents will love responding as cartoon dinosaurs. Also nice to see the fruits of the Workflow acquisition, this will allow people to do all sorts of customisations including using slang and profanity to trigger commands. "Hey Siri, order my favourite fucking pizza".
spunker540 8y ago
It’s amazing that even more bright minds are wasting time on ads.
brett40324 8y ago
There is an eye opening, amazing discussion about emojis going on here. But, like really aren't we just all accepting of the nuances of a cartoon based language? I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but that is reality. We're sending forest gump like 'shit happens' cartoons to one another.
balls187 8y ago
business partner and I both have Surface related products. His #1 complaint against Windows10, is the Emoji support compared to macOS.
gaius 8y ago
It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on oji At least it’s merely wasteful and not actually toxic. They could be working on more adtech.
Kliment 8y ago
I tolerate emoji (though don't use them myself) but I always get upset at the acceptance rate of new emoji compared to the historical acceptance rate of actual characters that are used in actual written languages by the unicode stewards.

Neal Stephenson may have not gotten the "Metaverse" prediction quite right, but he seems to have nailed "mediaglyphs".

Always interesting to see the divergence between HN and what the average user cares about. For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other. I can't think of another linguistic feature in history which saw such widespread use within a decade and I feel like emojis don't get enough credit for that.

engi_nerd 8y ago
How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
- mmphosis 8y ago
  :(
  - engi_nerd 8y ago
    But that's an emoticon, not an emoji.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      It’s a wireframe emoji before it hits the render pupeline.
      - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
        Reactmoji
- nicky0 8y ago
  Because it uses pictures instead of words.
  - stormking 8y ago
    That idea was dismissed several thousand years ago, and for good reason. Text is way more powerful and precise than pictures. And I'm not saying having both is a bad thing, but this focus on Emojis is just idiotic.
    - ovao 8y ago
      Text accompanied by images has been a staple of modern visual communication for the past several hundred years. Emojis just bring additional ways to express oneself in addition to plain text. They augment; they do not replace.
    - kridsdale1 8y ago
      Emotional human conversation is imprecise. Tactical use of that is a skill.
    - wsc981 8y ago
      When I chat with my Thai girlfriend, many miles away, we usually use the LINE app. We don't directly use emoji's, but we do use stickers [0] as part of our chat. And I feel stickers provide much the same use as emojis, the can more easily be used to convey emotions in a chat that would otherwise be harder to interpret correctly. --- [0]: https://store.line.me/stickershop/showcase/top/en https://store.line.me/stickershop/showcase/top/en
      - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
        That's one of the main reasons I use Telegram - stickers + emojis + text is far more superior to just text. I feel sorry for some of the emotionally crippled people upstream who are so dismissive of this.
- dewey 8y ago
  Sometimes I'd like to think that it prevents misunderstandings. But that's probably very subjective. I'd also guess that just because they feature it heavily on the keynote that a huge team spent the whole year only working on just Emojis. That doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of other teams doing important ground work and internal improvements that are not that easy to showcase on a keynote for a very diverse audience and press.
- mistersquid 8y ago
  My significant other suffers from depression. We are long distance and much of our daily communication is through text-messaging. We both rely on this one emoji to communicate more effectively: <smiling face with squinting eyes> [0] We use others, but that one emoji makes all the difference in the world. Often we send only that single sign to each other. [0] https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ EDIT: Replace emoji with text description and add citation.
  - sologoub 8y ago
    Very curious - what do you think makes the image version superior to the text-based smiley? And as a follow-on, do you think the animated and personalized versions of these emojis make it that much more effective? For me, the text version communicates the same meaning and context, so it’s fascinating to see examples where the representational medium has a significant impact.
    - jodrellblank 8y ago
      This smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes is one of the few emoji that cause an automatic emotional response inside me. Another is https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face/ https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face/ (Apple rendition of both, particularly). Text, and ASCII emoticons, just don't do that. (and I'm guessing that after I see enough "we can save you money on your car insurance :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: manipulative overuse by marketing "humans", emojis won't do it anymore either). (Although, do you genuinely think a photo of a cat being cute is emotionally the same and just as effective as a description of a cat being cute?)
    - pcurve 8y ago
      it's definitely different for everybody. text based ones are limited in range of emotions they can convey. I never understood people that spent money on digital goods until I found kakaotalk emojis. for me there is no comparison. I adore their animated emojis and I'm willing to pay for them as do many others. you can check them out. https://youtu.be/sKCPUfPaJBI https://youtu.be/sKCPUfPaJBI
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  I suspect some people have either never heard of emoji - could be old or young, not sure - or simply didn't think they would use it before these kinds of features came along. Outside of Apple nerd (and broader HN) social circles, the awareness of this is probably much smaller than we realize. After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
- jcfrei 8y ago
  A major part of human communication happens through facial expressions. Emojis/Animojis enable this for digital communication. It's new in the sense that we now have a global set of symbols for these expressions.
- ben509 8y ago
  "Whole new way" is a bit hyperbolic, but an emoji definitely brings layers of meaning that are normally only feasible in in-person conversation into the written realm. It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy. It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don't have to explain why you approve or add your own commentary, you just indicate your approval. And if you write a comment on a thread, there's a certain expectation that it contain an original thought or that it demands a response. So reactions manage to avoid a lot of inane filler. For a good illustration, watch a thread on Facebook where they say "type AMEN if you agree!" and you get a thousand people tediously writing it out. If there were just a little prayer emoji and a counter, you get closer to their actual intent, since that's literally what "amen" means.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    > It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
    - sxg 8y ago
      Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can use. What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.
- dabockster 8y ago
  I think emojis are better at conveying emotion than straight text, since emotion is a very visual in-the-moment thing.
- bambataa 8y ago
  A friend asked if he could crash at my place one night and said “don’t worry if not, I got options” followed by the nail-painting emoji. How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?
  - morsch 8y ago
    I wouldn't even know how to express it in words. This may or may not be an example of it -- for all I know it's a commonly used one with a well-established metaphoric meaning --, but I think emoji usage is strangely idiosyncratic.
  - komali2 8y ago
    "hahah, no worries, if you don't come maybe I'll just paint my nails or something"
    - udp 8y ago
      You missed the joke.
      - komali2 8y ago
        Did I? Maybe emoticons aren't as universal as we're assuming then ;)
      - ripdog 8y ago
        I did too. Perhaps if emoji are such an ambiguous method of communication, they aren't so good after all? That isn't an isolated instance of emoji confusion for me, either. Apart from the basic facial expression emoji, for me they're a great way of making a sentence more confusing.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    It's hard to say how to express that, since I have absolutely no idea what it means :) If I got that message I would be pretty confused. Is the other option literal nail-painting or is it just sarcasm?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  I don't mean this to sound in any way cruel or judgemental, but a very large proportion of the population have very limited literacy skills. Emoji are useful for all users who are writing short, personal messages that might be ambiguous in tone. They are extremely useful for people who would otherwise struggle to express or understand tone and emotion using the written word. In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that. Here are a couple of example questions from that test. Only 33% of Americans could describe what is expressed in the following poem: "The pedigree of honey Does not concern the Bee - A clover, any time, to him Is Aristocracy" Either a literal or thematic description of the poem constitutes an acceptable answer. Read the text at the link below. After reading this text, only 16% of Americans could describe the purpose of the Se Habla Español expo. https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164 https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164 Acceptable answers include any statement such as the following: "to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community", "to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community" and "to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community". Did you get the right answer? 84% of Americans didn't. Bear that in mind when you're writing documentation or dialog boxes. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-...
  - adventured 8y ago
    > In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that. That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, and who is in the figures (a lot of non-English speaking immigrants), usually to try to prove points. The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at. Over half of China is below basic by the US standard. Over half of Eastern Europe is below the US basic line, including Russia. In the US ~44% of the below basic population are non-native English speakers, who didn't speak English at all prior to starting school. 39% are Hispanic adults. Ie this group overwhelmingly consists of currently or originally low skill, poor immigrants (people that wouldn't even be allowed into most other developed nations such as Canada). Demonstrating that effect in action, 43% of hispanic adults test poorly in literacy, compared to about 10% of white adults. Gee, I wonder if immigration into a new culture + language barrier has something to do with these numbers. Despite a vast immigration flow of low skill, poor, low English literate persons since 1980, the US literacy rate didn't drop meaningfully. That means literacy rates for the base population increased. Despite all of that, the US is the 7th most literate nation on earth, in front of: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel, South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Russia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/08/most-literate-nation-in-the-world-not-the-u-s-new-ranking-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/...
- fdye 8y ago
  It amuses me to think we have moved from the printed word back to hieroglyphs (emoji). Not in a derogatory way, communication is communication, but in a awe of older cultures. I like the thought experiment of imagining a fallen advanced civilization in Egypt. I imagine them stuck... watching their batteries drop to 0%, and turning to stone and emoji as the only way to persist communication. What if printed words were really just a transitional state of language until their purest form, emoji!
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    To a certain extent, one could consider Chinese characters to be more like emoji than words constructed via a phonetic alphabet, in which case there never really was a transition period, just some backwater outliers.
  - _nosaj 8y ago
    The Ancient Egyptians also used base 2 multiplication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplicatio...
EpicEng 8y ago
> For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other Wow that is an extremely generous characterization. At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  If you haven't seen how emojis are used in the wild to enhance communication, it's probably not for you.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    You didn't read. I said that you can convey any of these equally well in ascii. Yes, it's handy to be able to plug an :) at the end of a sentence which may otherwise sound rude/overly direct. That doesn't mean I need 1000 icons, and _that's what we're talking about_.
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      I read the whole thing. The emojis serve a purpose. Text doesn't serve that purpose. I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. They're not a stand-in for emoticons. You don't get it. It's okay. Not everything is for you.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        > I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. Consider the possibility that this is because there isn't one.
        rainbowmverse 8y ago
        HN doesn't support emoji, so here's an example: https://cybre.space/@Riley/100149464360818801 https://cybre.space/@Riley/100149464360818801 The meaning is immediately clear to anyone familiar with the reference. It's basically a pictographic language that leans heavily on a shared culture that's largely internet-based.
agumonkey 8y ago
maybe that's still not worth a wwdc talk but more like 'obviously we added support for this emoji thing'
MitjaBezensek 8y ago
I have yet to see animoji used by anyone outside of Apple events.
brothercolor 8y ago
Agreed -- as a Deaf person who uses visual languages to communicate, it's allowed me to actually begin to express myself using a set of pseudo-language visual elements. Some of them roughly map over to ASL expressions; I am looking forward to when they add ASL-specific emoji, or ASL language support, or even hands in the new animoji.
- komali2 8y ago
  There's no way to say this without being insensitive, but this reminds me of a grade school joke without a punchline - "how do you write in sign-language?" Can you help me better understand what ASL language support would look like or what that would mean to you?
  - exikyut 8y ago
    I'm not deaf, but as per the GP's comment, I can immediately see animojis with hands performing sign gestures. If you consider how ingrained and emotionally significant that expressions in your native language are, animojis with hands - which will take that emotional significance and put a cute spin on it - is going to be massive.
  - gumby 8y ago
    ASL (or any language's sign language) isn't a simple translation of gestures for words or letters; the different sign languages have their own grammars and a different "vocabulary". Think of every sign language user as being bilingual, with a sign language and a written language.
  - baddox 8y ago
    I would imagine that ASL speakers have usage patterns that they would like to express via text messaging without simply “translating” them into formal written English. That’s no different than why English speakers use emoji (“” instead of “I am happy”) or informal onomatopoeia (“uggh” instead of “I am annoyed”).
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
paganel 8y ago
> I can't think of another linguistic feature in history Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak. > Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings. There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.
ASalazarMX 8y ago
> For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other Emojis I agree, they are standardized and their meaning is clear by convention. Animojis? That's just salespeak for snapchat-like filters. They're funny but the novelty wears off the same day.
blt 8y ago
I suffer from social anxiety. There were a lot of times in the past when I would receive a text and fail to reply because I got stuck trying to figure out how to express myself "correctly". Emojis and the normalization of emoji-heavy texts help me a lot.
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labster 8y ago

Your glob matches moji, which just means "letters". So many bright minds wasted at colleges of Letters and Science, eh?

cdelsolar 8y ago

Emoji are amazing, stop it.

bitL 8y ago

It's fun to develop it - computer vision, facial features detection, 3D mesh deformation - I programmed all those parts for another unrelated app and it was total fun. Not that it was useful or something, but I enjoyed it a lot.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

I'd far rather they do that than try to get people to click on ads.

kalleboo 8y ago

Still beats them wasting their time trying to manipulate minds with either ads or freemium games.

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StephenMelon 8y ago

I think the new Facetime features are gamechangers in terms of driving usage. All this stuff was already available in Snapchat etc. but Snap's problem is that the impressive AR stuff they were doing 3 years ago is now built into the OS. Allowing people to call each other as avatars complete with facial expressions or with flattering filters applied gets rid of one of the last remaining key barriers to mass video calling adoption: people tend to look like hell in low light on front-facing cameras. Teenagers will upgrade to Face ID just to get these features, grandkids will love calling their grandparents as cartoon tigers and grandparents will love responding as cartoon dinosaurs. Also nice to see the fruits of the Workflow acquisition, this will allow people to do all sorts of customisations including using slang and profanity to trigger commands. "Hey Siri, order my favourite fucking pizza".

spunker540 8y ago

It’s amazing that even more bright minds are wasting time on ads.

brett40324 8y ago

There is an eye opening, amazing discussion about emojis going on here. But, like really aren't we just all accepting of the nuances of a cartoon based language? I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but that is reality. We're sending forest gump like 'shit happens' cartoons to one another.

balls187 8y ago

business partner and I both have Surface related products. His #1 complaint against Windows10, is the Emoji support compared to macOS.

gaius 8y ago

It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on oji At least it’s merely wasteful and not actually toxic. They could be working on more adtech.

Kliment 8y ago

I tolerate emoji (though don't use them myself) but I always get upset at the acceptance rate of new emoji compared to the historical acceptance rate of actual characters that are used in actual written languages by the unicode stewards.