4 ms·

Emojis need more serious attention. A lot of online conflicts start from miscommunication due to lack of facial expressions. To the point thats its driving a so

Emojis need more serious attention. A lot of online conflicts start from miscommunication due to lack of facial expressions. To the point thats its driving a social crisis and division in the real world.

bluefirebrand 5y ago
This seems like much too large a problem to tackle with emoji. Even as complex as emoji are becoming, they really still don't address the issues behind online miscommunication. And I really doubt they ever could.
quesera 5y ago
As a recent observer of a discussion wherein the dramatic differences between single, double, and triple-dot sentence terminators were argued, I think concerns about emoji facial expressions might be valid, but resolving them would still leave us in a world of crisis and division..
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Humans came up with a way to express musical notes on paper. To me that seems much more challenging. The list of common emotions is not that numerous. We need some shortcut, compact way of expressing them in writing. It would go a long way to score, or markup our words with some sort of emotion meter. Perhaps thats what music is to singing. Just maybe a visual way of doing that. Emojis are hard to use. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emotion/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emo...
  - quesera 5y ago
    I'm not disagreeing, but note that humans have not come up with a way to express musical notes in Unicode or Emoji. The second vertical dimension is critical for music notation. I'd suggest that the same idea applies to nuanced facial expressions. You could certainly devise a set of glyphs to stand in, but they would have to be learned by everyone. The failures we see today are attempts at rendering expressions on drawn faces -- and to be fair, even a high res photographic still image of a real human making an expression could be easy to misinterpret. Especially across cultures and subcultures. My 15-year old niece has very strong opinions on how many periods I use to end sentences.. I think "fixing" emoji is probably a lost cause. But I am biased since I don't care at all. The most interesting and amusing thing I know about emoji is that when Apple changed the "gun" from a realistic-looking Glock/etc to a toy squirt gun, all the ingrates who used the image in a threatening manner ended up looking silly to iOS users. Android followed quickly. I support the same sillification of negative and angry facial expression emoji as well, FWIW, and I think it's probably hopeless to try to cram nuance into any of them. Fortunately, we still have words.
- jmholla 5y ago
  What was the outcome of that argument?
  - quesera 5y ago
    I think the main takeaway for the majority of participants was that I'm old and don't know how to talk on the Internet.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  compare, in order of relative "uh-oh!": OK. Ok. Ok ok
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    I also find (thumbs up emoji) and (ok emoji) to be somewhat ambiguous. I see them as potentially sarcastic. Really, sarcasm is the biggest barrier to effective online communication. Apparently you cannot use emojis on HN.
  - quesera 5y ago
    Don't forget: k kk k... et cetera et alii ad nauseam
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  I can't stand ".." being used in communications. It's not a thing, and because of that it's incredibly ambiguous!
tester34 5y ago
Maybe people need to learn how to express themselves precisely on the other hand people still for some reason believe that "lol" only means "laughing out loud" which's lol itself. so maybe it's impossible?

bluefirebrand 5y ago

This seems like much too large a problem to tackle with emoji. Even as complex as emoji are becoming, they really still don't address the issues behind online miscommunication. And I really doubt they ever could.

quesera 5y ago

As a recent observer of a discussion wherein the dramatic differences between single, double, and triple-dot sentence terminators were argued, I think concerns about emoji facial expressions might be valid, but resolving them would still leave us in a world of crisis and division..

dukeofdoom 5y ago
Humans came up with a way to express musical notes on paper. To me that seems much more challenging. The list of common emotions is not that numerous. We need some shortcut, compact way of expressing them in writing. It would go a long way to score, or markup our words with some sort of emotion meter. Perhaps thats what music is to singing. Just maybe a visual way of doing that. Emojis are hard to use. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emotion/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emo...
- quesera 5y ago
  I'm not disagreeing, but note that humans have not come up with a way to express musical notes in Unicode or Emoji. The second vertical dimension is critical for music notation. I'd suggest that the same idea applies to nuanced facial expressions. You could certainly devise a set of glyphs to stand in, but they would have to be learned by everyone. The failures we see today are attempts at rendering expressions on drawn faces -- and to be fair, even a high res photographic still image of a real human making an expression could be easy to misinterpret. Especially across cultures and subcultures. My 15-year old niece has very strong opinions on how many periods I use to end sentences.. I think "fixing" emoji is probably a lost cause. But I am biased since I don't care at all. The most interesting and amusing thing I know about emoji is that when Apple changed the "gun" from a realistic-looking Glock/etc to a toy squirt gun, all the ingrates who used the image in a threatening manner ended up looking silly to iOS users. Android followed quickly. I support the same sillification of negative and angry facial expression emoji as well, FWIW, and I think it's probably hopeless to try to cram nuance into any of them. Fortunately, we still have words.
jmholla 5y ago
What was the outcome of that argument?
- quesera 5y ago
  I think the main takeaway for the majority of participants was that I'm old and don't know how to talk on the Internet.
hprotagonist 5y ago
compare, in order of relative "uh-oh!": OK. Ok. Ok ok
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  I also find (thumbs up emoji) and (ok emoji) to be somewhat ambiguous. I see them as potentially sarcastic. Really, sarcasm is the biggest barrier to effective online communication. Apparently you cannot use emojis on HN.
- quesera 5y ago
  Don't forget: k kk k... et cetera et alii ad nauseam
JohnWhigham 5y ago
I can't stand ".." being used in communications. It's not a thing, and because of that it's incredibly ambiguous!

tester34 5y ago

Maybe people need to learn how to express themselves precisely on the other hand people still for some reason believe that "lol" only means "laughing out loud" which's lol itself. so maybe it's impossible?