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I thought this would be more about how emojis have invaded products. I recognise their communication value but they are aesthetic disasters (colour, dated cart

I thought this would be more about how emojis have invaded products. I recognise their communication value but they are aesthetic disasters (colour, dated cartoon style, cacophony) and they are real lowest common denominator expressions - often the equivalent of a fart noise or a “+1”. To support emoji you hand over a huge slice of product aesthetic and expressivity to something which in all essentials, is very childish. I looked at reddit recently and all the emoji awards that can even apply background animations like flames gave me the strong impression that “this is not for adults”. For something smaller that might be a fine choice but reddit’s opportunity seems to be much larger as the pre-eminent threaded discussion site across all demographics and if anything I suspect longer form discussion skews older.

haywirez 6y ago
> “this is not for adults” That’s a critical feature.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mattlutze 6y ago
Emoji are a native part of the vocabulary of a couple generations now. What you might be noticing is a platform signaling that it's supporting those folks as well. Every Millennial is an adult, as are many Gen Z'ers, and these plus the first all-21st century generation are going to have come to expect emoji to exist and existed in digital spaces where emoji are a part of the jargon. Why would it make sense for Reddit to force these people to communicate less completely than they are used to doing?
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  I fully acknowledge they are part of language now and it’s a much harder decision to not support them, my point relating to the topic is that they aren’t simply new words, or an interaction pattern or a ligature but kawaii design elements that are very viral - driving further spread of poop emoji aesthetic. I hope that they continue to evolve into typefaces that allow for more elegant design decisions. There is a lot of value in the emoji concept if we could separate from their design. For example, I created a reasoning tool prototype driven by emoji - it was just so ugly I had to burn it with fire. It was also inconsistent across platforms.
  - bb123 6y ago
    I agree - emojis often add emotional metadata to sentence. Often times it could be communicated with words but emojis are easier so naturally people are going to use them.
    - jeegsy 6y ago
      In theory perhaps. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people typing LOL or laugh w/ tears emoji without so much as a grin, let alone a 'laugh out loud'.
- bb123 6y ago
  I think it goes back a lot longer than that - humans have been using symbols to express feelings for thousands of years. Written language is really the child of that. Personally I think humans will always communicate via little pictogram symbols, regardless of how perfect written communication with words is. There is something very innate about two eyes and an upward curved line meaning happy - and lots of similar examples. Emojis are just a form of this.
  - duncanawoods 6y ago
    True but I don’t think any pictogram language has ever been as ugly as emoji. It’s the “programmer art” of pictograms. Brushes and carving seem to be helpful design constraints to drive restraint, regularity and simplicity.
swiley 6y ago
I really wish emoji were monochromatic like the rest of the text. GNU unifont is like this but I don’t think most people like that.
radoslawc 6y ago
This reminds me what was happening in forums in "internet forums era". At some point in most of them users could make their own footer, so many users put there various "badges" from ones stating that they are proud vim users to what graphics card and power supply they have in their PC. Most of the time it was actually more content than post itself. Add to this animated emoticons and it was actually harder to read and focus on content which kind of defeats the purpose of internet forums.
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  Yup - also makes me think of a parallel with medieval illuminated scripts. We could print all books today with trees growing in the margin or whatever but we don’t because a pleasant reading experience depends more on simplicity and quality of the basics (typeface, typesetting, print and paper) rather than ornamentation.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  One of the two big reasons I find places like HN or Reddit much better for discussing things than old phpBB-style forums. The other, biggest one being tree-structured threads instead of flat lists. I'm first to customize stuff for myself, but I've grown to believe that public-facing customization is best left severely limited when dealing with general audience.
  - btrettel 6y ago
    One disadvantage of the minimal customization approach is the difficulty of knowing who is posting what at a glance. Avatars seem to help me a lot on this. Here at HN I've had to make an effort to read the usernames, which are in a grey font smaller than the main text. This makes it harder to differentiate between people. In the past, I've replied to comments here not realizing who I was replying to. On a phpBB-style forum, if I find that I'm repeatedly replying to someone then I'm likely to pay closer attention to that person and maybe even become friends with them. To me, one of the values of a forum is building relationships, and if people are less distinguishable then this becomes more difficult. I first realized this after this recent HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151 I agree that too much customization brings the focus on irrelevancies, but no customization (beyond a username) isn't right either. One compromise would be to allow avatars of a certain size but nothing else (signatures, flairs, etc.), but this becomes difficult with threaded comments. Lobsters has tiny avatars but they seem too unobtrusive. Relatedly, StackExchange has randomly generated avatars, presumably to get around the problem of some people not customizing, but they aren't memorable.
rogual 6y ago
“this is not for adults” Sometimes I feel like adulthood is a social performance that people just aren't that into these days. I mean, sure, there's biological adulthood, which is a bit more well-defined, but in the usual sense of the word, as a collection of tastes, behaviours, modes of expresssion, etc., perhaps it's just going out of style.
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  In my mind, adult taste is not just fashion but integrates judgement of quality and function. The adult has specific goals which are often benefited by greater order and less noise. A child doesn't share those goals. Their focus is play and seek pure stimulation and delight in noise. It's probably true that adulthood is increasingly playful which feeds into tricky questions about whether this is infantalisation or something more positive like increased authenticity now that we are freed from arbitrary constraints of decorum such as dress-codes, rigid hours, cap doffing etc.

haywirez 6y ago

> “this is not for adults” That’s a critical feature.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mattlutze 6y ago

Emoji are a native part of the vocabulary of a couple generations now. What you might be noticing is a platform signaling that it's supporting those folks as well. Every Millennial is an adult, as are many Gen Z'ers, and these plus the first all-21st century generation are going to have come to expect emoji to exist and existed in digital spaces where emoji are a part of the jargon. Why would it make sense for Reddit to force these people to communicate less completely than they are used to doing?

duncanawoods 6y ago
I fully acknowledge they are part of language now and it’s a much harder decision to not support them, my point relating to the topic is that they aren’t simply new words, or an interaction pattern or a ligature but kawaii design elements that are very viral - driving further spread of poop emoji aesthetic. I hope that they continue to evolve into typefaces that allow for more elegant design decisions. There is a lot of value in the emoji concept if we could separate from their design. For example, I created a reasoning tool prototype driven by emoji - it was just so ugly I had to burn it with fire. It was also inconsistent across platforms.
- bb123 6y ago
  I agree - emojis often add emotional metadata to sentence. Often times it could be communicated with words but emojis are easier so naturally people are going to use them.
  - jeegsy 6y ago
    In theory perhaps. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people typing LOL or laugh w/ tears emoji without so much as a grin, let alone a 'laugh out loud'.
bb123 6y ago
I think it goes back a lot longer than that - humans have been using symbols to express feelings for thousands of years. Written language is really the child of that. Personally I think humans will always communicate via little pictogram symbols, regardless of how perfect written communication with words is. There is something very innate about two eyes and an upward curved line meaning happy - and lots of similar examples. Emojis are just a form of this.
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  True but I don’t think any pictogram language has ever been as ugly as emoji. It’s the “programmer art” of pictograms. Brushes and carving seem to be helpful design constraints to drive restraint, regularity and simplicity.

swiley 6y ago

I really wish emoji were monochromatic like the rest of the text. GNU unifont is like this but I don’t think most people like that.

radoslawc 6y ago

This reminds me what was happening in forums in "internet forums era". At some point in most of them users could make their own footer, so many users put there various "badges" from ones stating that they are proud vim users to what graphics card and power supply they have in their PC. Most of the time it was actually more content than post itself. Add to this animated emoticons and it was actually harder to read and focus on content which kind of defeats the purpose of internet forums.

duncanawoods 6y ago
Yup - also makes me think of a parallel with medieval illuminated scripts. We could print all books today with trees growing in the margin or whatever but we don’t because a pleasant reading experience depends more on simplicity and quality of the basics (typeface, typesetting, print and paper) rather than ornamentation.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
One of the two big reasons I find places like HN or Reddit much better for discussing things than old phpBB-style forums. The other, biggest one being tree-structured threads instead of flat lists. I'm first to customize stuff for myself, but I've grown to believe that public-facing customization is best left severely limited when dealing with general audience.
- btrettel 6y ago
  One disadvantage of the minimal customization approach is the difficulty of knowing who is posting what at a glance. Avatars seem to help me a lot on this. Here at HN I've had to make an effort to read the usernames, which are in a grey font smaller than the main text. This makes it harder to differentiate between people. In the past, I've replied to comments here not realizing who I was replying to. On a phpBB-style forum, if I find that I'm repeatedly replying to someone then I'm likely to pay closer attention to that person and maybe even become friends with them. To me, one of the values of a forum is building relationships, and if people are less distinguishable then this becomes more difficult. I first realized this after this recent HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151 I agree that too much customization brings the focus on irrelevancies, but no customization (beyond a username) isn't right either. One compromise would be to allow avatars of a certain size but nothing else (signatures, flairs, etc.), but this becomes difficult with threaded comments. Lobsters has tiny avatars but they seem too unobtrusive. Relatedly, StackExchange has randomly generated avatars, presumably to get around the problem of some people not customizing, but they aren't memorable.

rogual 6y ago

“this is not for adults” Sometimes I feel like adulthood is a social performance that people just aren't that into these days. I mean, sure, there's biological adulthood, which is a bit more well-defined, but in the usual sense of the word, as a collection of tastes, behaviours, modes of expresssion, etc., perhaps it's just going out of style.

duncanawoods 6y ago
In my mind, adult taste is not just fashion but integrates judgement of quality and function. The adult has specific goals which are often benefited by greater order and less noise. A child doesn't share those goals. Their focus is play and seek pure stimulation and delight in noise. It's probably true that adulthood is increasingly playful which feeds into tricky questions about whether this is infantalisation or something more positive like increased authenticity now that we are freed from arbitrary constraints of decorum such as dress-codes, rigid hours, cap doffing etc.