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It can be a way of adding intonation and other affective, out-of-band communication back into text. I never really see people use them purely to replace words o

It can be a way of adding intonation and other affective, out-of-band communication back into text. I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one. But interspersed throughout a message, emojis can, as you say, add irony, but also communicate that a message that could be taken as ironic isn't, or communicate some other subtext. Text is a flattening of speech, and emojis can add some of those missing dimensions back -- and, like our IRL verbal cues, tics, and gestures, they can be hard to decode if you're not "in" on the game.

zck 6y ago
> I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one. This article does that. Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically. > To stay relevant in the age of social media you had to support emoji or you were in the . EDIT: HN stripped the emoji. The end of that sentence was "or you were :skull: in the :droplet:", read as "or you were dead in the water".
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  > Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically. Maybe not ironically, but doing that definitely adds informality - exactly the kind of out-of-band context that GP is talking about.