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Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻ They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what t
by setr 7y ago
Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻
They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence.
The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.
I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji
- codezero 7y agoI don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)
- setr 7y agoI'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression. Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it. And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear