22 ms·

I Stopped Using Emojis

194 points by JonathanBuchh 5y ago

hoseja 5y ago
"language has grammar - with nouns and verbs - which isn’t the case of emoji" I'd definitively argue there certainly can be verbs, the best example coming to mind is the arrow. Also, am I the only one who likes to construct entire silly rebus sentences out of emoji?
mirekrusin 5y ago
Rainbows and other crap on ie. github project readme more often than not makes the whole thing look like three-ring circus mess.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Some people add them after nouns on their Facebook updates, e.g. my last sentence would have the "man and woman" emoji after the word "people". So their posts look like my kindergarten worksheet where we had to complete sentences by identifying the pictures and filling in the blank space next to them.
veltas 5y ago
Reading about how they have carefully designed the pictures to prevent people from communicating certain things, it reminds me of the language in Orwell's 1984 which was a simplistic and limited language designed to make it impossible to dissent.
- literalsunbear 5y ago
  oh my god come on man
  - veltas 5y ago
    If you mention 1984 at all today, the anti-1984 police will come and complain that you'd dare compare anything in modern society to the dystopia in the book, even though I wasn't implying there was any repression. To me it's just an interesting similarity.
    - literalsunbear 5y ago
      read a new book, i'm begging you
      - veltas 5y ago
        I enjoy the prospect of finding out what novels you think are better or more suitable.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  have you considered that emojis are a lot of fun and can add to your "voice"?
  - veltas 5y ago
    What did I say? I was just saying they literally tried to prevent you from saying specific things with the designs of the icons, and made the connection. I didn't say they weren't fun.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Have you considered that "fun" and "communication" are two different words and neither of them is in any way dependent on the other?
- cgrealy 5y ago
  The important difference is that newspeak was designed to replace language whereas emojis supplement it. There are plenty of emojis that can be used to express dissent, skepticism or even out right anger.
  - veltas 5y ago
    And as a general advantage emoji isn't trying to replace words. Nobody is (as far as I know) required to use emoji. People can pick and choose when they want them.
    - xdennis 5y ago
      The point is that it's a political choice to give people the ability to communicate through emojis while removing it from others (e.g. the gun example).
  - xdennis 5y ago
    Weren't Unicode emojis designed to replace image emoticons?
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  OTOH its a dictionary of ideograms that gets extended every year in a fairly democratic way: anyone can suggest or propose an emoji, which is quite different than the English Oxford Dictionary.
xiphias2 5y ago
Emojis are extremely useful for personality matching on Tinder. My favourite is the non-smoking emoji as I would never date a person who is smoking, but there are many other things that I love in life and emojis give me a way to communicate them visually.
- terom 5y ago
  Interesting, given the examples in this article and [1] of confusion and miscommunication caused by differences in how different platforms depict the same emoji. So in the context of online dating, does that mean that humans are now selecting for the best compatibility between users of the same mobile platforms? :) I can see how some apps decided to switch to their own emoji sets... [1] https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojipedia-lookups-at-all-time-high/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojipedia-lookups-at-all-time-h...
29athrowaway 5y ago
Emojis are a way to standardize expressions of sentiment so that your text is easier to parse by intelligence services /s. Humor aside... they may reduce network bandwidth, they reduce the need for inline images, etc.
bussierem 5y ago
I don't want to just jump in with some negative comment here but let's start with being honest - 95% of this post is about the history of emojis, how to use them, and what they mean. Which is a helluva lot of information about emojis for an article that concludes that they enjoyed NOT using emojis, and doesn't really have any substantive conclusion to make about things or any follow up.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Like so many web sites and blog posts, it's nothing more than keyword stuffing. Trolling for Google clicks rather than imparting information.
- insickness 5y ago
  Without unnecessary information about the history of emojis, this would have been the entire article: -------------- When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? How about a week? In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour. Here’s what I wanted to find out: How does the lack of emoji affect my conversations with others? Will other aspects of my interactions be affected? My hypothesis was “I will somehow want to compensate for the lack of emoji.” So, what did happen when I stopped using emojis? On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote: “This is actually cool, I don't know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.” No shit, Sherlock. In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean. In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile. Ever since my 2-week experiment ended, and I started operating with emojis again, I’ve been paying more attention to what I write. I prefer using emoji on top of self-sufficient phrasing. I want to make sure that my messages are clear enough without emoji, and only then might I add one, spending it on expendable flair rather than something meaning is reliant on. I wholeheartedly invite you to carry out this experiment for yourself. Who knows what fantastic feeling or intriguing behaviour you might uncover?
vangelis 5y ago
I do wish apps (looking at you Slack and Teams) would stop converting my emoticons into emojis. I want :) not . edit: HackerNews strips render emoji. It should be this: https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  The kids started reversing the smile once software started auto-converting (:
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    So he should use "vv?"
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I didn't get the reference until I circled back to the read the link vangelis posted. this is where I'd use the clapping emoji
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      I had no idea ^^ was an emoticon. I've been using it for years as a way to say "this."
      - aulin 5y ago
        I always used to point out something in the line/sentence above... When did it change to a smile?!
        csande17 5y ago
        Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though. The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.
sys_64738 5y ago
Smily faces forever. You can keep your emoji junk.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
systemvoltage 5y ago
Emojis are fine in text messages and IM/Slack. I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. I just find them distracting since they stand out strongly in a block of text - eyes instantly gravitate to colorful emojis in a rather smooth flow of text.
- dnautics 5y ago
  There's some emojis I don't mind in prs, like rocketship for deploy and the worm for bug fixes
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    haha, that rocketship is forever associated with r/wallstreetbets and "To the moon" meme for me.
    - justshowpost 5y ago
      Well, investors were always referring to the steep, high momentum upward trend as a rocket..
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- ykat7 5y ago
  > I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. Completely agree. I also find emoji in commit messages [1] to be far more ambiguous than their text equivalents. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021
pyrophane 5y ago
Emojis solve the problem of texting being inefficient at the expense of ceding a lot of the expressiveness to someone else. Suddenly committees are deciding what you mean. Turns out that for a lot of people, thats fine.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > committees are deciding what you mean Not any different from using the alphabet and words.
  - sebmellen 5y ago
    Very different, in fact. Yes, language is socially and culturally determined, but it is incredibly organic and expressive. A small counsel of people deciding which emotions can be expressed, and how, is entirely different. 1984 taught us the dangers of a limited and/or artificially created vocabulary. Are the lessons not the same today?
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      People impute alternate meanings to words all the time. Such as "nasty" being flipped to meaning "cool". There's nothing constraining people from using emojis to mean things different from what they are defined to be. For example, the wallstreetbets subreddit has their own local meanings for various icons. Note that all alphabets started out as emojis. The vocabulary was, of course, very limited, and the emojis gradually got shortened, simplified, and turned into a sound, then stringing the sounds together meant a rich set of words could be formed. Did you know that the letter 'A' was originally a picture of a bull's head?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      It's like the internet method to convey body language
    - duckmysick 5y ago
      Many languages have small counsels of people that act as an authority on their vocabulary and usage. The French Academy, for example, has 40 members.
delgaudm 5y ago
I wonder if this this is a generational thing or what other factors are at play: My peer group and I might use the occasional smiley, but it is exceeding rare that I would use any emoji for anything. I also don't see many emojis in messages to me.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I'm sure it's a generational thing. The only place I actually see a lot of emoji use is stuff reposted on Reddit, usually corporate twitter accounts and MLM marketeers.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  Not an emoji, but an emoticon in a message to you: xD
neilv 5y ago
The main use I have for emoji is in the emoji-reactions in the Slack that we have to use at my current company. The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response that doesn't interrupt people with a notification (like a message would). They'll see the response when they return to the view.
- Tepix 5y ago
  Exactly this. Acknowledging a message, confirming that you are working on it, giving brief feedback (yes/no) without interrupting
- mastazi 5y ago
  The thing that makes me sad about Slack emoji reactions is that across Windows and Mac users, Slack defaults to a different emoji for the check mark. In particular the default check mark that Windows users will be invited to use, is hard to see if the receiver is using a dark theme on their device. Note: this was a few months ago, my company switched to a different platform so maybe it's been fixed in the meantime
- berkes 5y ago
  > that doesn't interrupt people with a notification [...] The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response Isn't the entire premiss of Slack that it is asynchronous? That it does not interrupt the flow in the way a phonecall or tap-on-shoulder does? What went wrong that now the senders of communication have to -again- tread carefully, be aware of the receivers status and work, employ kludges, so not to interrupt co-workers?
mch82 5y ago
I love the core set of smiley face emoji, but skip most of the rest because they’re either too hard to find or too easy to misunderstand. I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… Any good articles out there on that topic? As an amateur observer of languages, it seems like the purpose & grammar of the emoji set isn’t well enough defined. Maybe some of the emoji are adjectives & should only appear once a verb or noun emoji is picked… Maybe “watermelon” should be a compound of “water” and “melon”… Are there any notable emoji keyboard experiments out there? I wonder if anyone has tried organizing emoji like a Chinese keyboard (which I have seen & used, but may misunderstand since I don’t read Chinese).
- bradrn 5y ago
  > I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words But in combination, they can represent many more, surely, just like hieroglyphs or Chinese characters?
    - bradrn 5y ago
      Sure, but in that case you’d need to have some sort of convention for what each combination represents, and at that point you’ve basically invented a whole new writing system based on emoji. As I said previously: > Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
stordoff 5y ago
Part of this article touches on why I don't use emoji[1] - I don't know what they will look to the recipient most of the time. At least with emoticons/kaomoji, I have a decent idea. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter, but I can see it causing a miscommunication in some circumstances. [1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.
- Tepix 5y ago
  Is that really a big issue? Most of the standard emoji look the same pretty much everywhere.
- spidersouris 5y ago
  Both are used[1]. TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats-the-plural-of-emoji-emojis/422763/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats...
- ykat7 5y ago
  > "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese. Yep, I prefer "emoji" given the zero plural in Japanese. I don't think there's a consensus though. For example, Apple uses "emoji" [1], Emojipedia uses "emojis" [2], and the OED includes both [3]. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145 [2]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios-14-5/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios... [3]: https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343 https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343
- spacechild1 5y ago
  If a word is borrowed from another language and becomes common place, you can use the plural form of your language. Do you say “5 pizzas“ or “5 pizze“? A notable exception are Latin words, e.g. index -> indices (if you want oto sound well educated). The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form) EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!
toastal 5y ago
One thing I really dislike is the aesthetics of the Apple emoji. One could say "then don't use it", but so many sites and apps are shipping an entire emoji set. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter who have made their own brand of emoji, a lot of apps are just shipping Google or Microsoft or Apple's and instead of matching your system, it completely clashes and is a waste of bandwidth. If you're on Linux, it's a total dice roll which their design team should be the 'default'.
js8 5y ago
I actually went a step further and stopped using words, because it turns out people also interpret them differently. Some people, for example, cannot read sarcasm. Now I use sequent calculus, and make sure that every term is well-defined before I use it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  ...After reading the first half of your comment, I thought you were serious. Only after the second half did it finally dawn on me that you were probably being sarcastic. Seriously.
  - anthonypasq 5y ago
    not surprising considering it seems 75% of the users here are mildly autistic
  - blooalien 5y ago
    Good job reading the entire comment and using context to suss out the likely meaning and intent behind the words. That's actually a pretty rare skill these days in many parts of the Internet. ;) (Seriously.)
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  Sorry, I’m gonna need you to start over with 5,000 words on the history of words before I can process this joke.
  - romwell 5y ago
    Be sure to include the considerations that went into standardizing the spellings to make sure that we can't express dangerous ideas with doubleplusungood words.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      god can you imagine living with a standards-enforcing AI that takes your speech and makes sure to convert it to known-safe dictionary words?
veltas 5y ago
I recently found that having emoji fonts breaks my terminal. This bug will probably eventually be fixed so I didn't think too hard before removing emoji from my system. I don't use them myself and personally have not noticed them ever being used with a decent signal-to-noise ratio. I have come to associate them with snide or political remarks on Twitter and clickbait articles. I agree with the author that when people use emoji they are leaving large parts of their intent and feelings ambiguous and can be more specific (and will force themselves to think more about what they are really trying to convey) with textual messages.
slmjkdbtl 5y ago
Something I found interesting in the emoji usages in China: 1. In Wechat "emoji" is a superset that also includes memes, where you can use any kind of image as an emoji also add other's emoji to your library (kinda like slack emoji, but bigger and more emphasized). The humor and expressiveness is immense, people use them for daily conversations instead of a quick reaction tool (well that too). Everyone's emoji lib is vastly different and it says a lot about you as a person, it's almost like a personal language. 2. The "Smile" emoji in Wechat actually means hostility [0] in younger generations ("it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you"). Some older generations folks don't "get" it and still use them for good intent. It's always weird to see your parents send you that. [0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3029091/smiley-face-emoji-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-does-china https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3029091/smiley-face...
- sho 5y ago
  Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. The "plain smile" emoji is rarely used with friends, in favour of laughter-focused images, which I don't think is unique to Wechat.
  - ggm 5y ago
    > Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. This is where things get complicated: How can I know you're right and they're wrong? Thats no different to indirect references to things and people: so "dear leader" is understood to refer to the DPRK but in fact, contextually can be used to refer to any upward manager. The inherent ambiguity of meaning is a problem in all communication and across both words, and shapes, it's meaning is highly contextual, and I would suggest fluid: in 5 years time this specific wechat emoji/emoticon meaning will have shifted. "fab" probably had about 4-5 years of real currency in the 1960s. Now, its use is mostly confined to the near geriatrics or ironically. (and, to kids who watch "thunderbirds" F.A.B. probably lacks context)
    - rob74 5y ago
c01n 5y ago
Emojis are awesome, some of things are very difficult to express in text. I like how ancient Egypt wrote in diagrams.
asiachick 5y ago
I tend to find people who don't like emoji to be slightly racist. Given emoji started in Japan, they get this "ewww, who wants the foreign shit in my text". Even HN is slightly racist on this front. The fact that an entire culture embraced them and that you reject them is not racism with a capital R but is arguably in the gray area of, probably unintended, micro aggressions. You're basically telling an entire culture to go F themselves. If you don't like racism tag, then how about sexism. I'm pretty confident women use more emoji than men and I've seen plenty of female engineer's tech blog posts showing lots of emoji in their terminal prompts etc. So, assuming I'm correct, not supporting them is arguably sexist since you're effectively telling women "sorry, your preferred mode of expressing yourself is disallowed." I get that the blog post is about not using them personally and that's of course 100% fine. But if you're judging people on if they use them or not, or if you're making systems that don't support them, please reconsider.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  We're talking about peppering one's writing with brightly colored little pictures. If a dislike of that is anything, it's ageist: I don't want the way I write to give people the impression that I'm a ten year old.
- zylent 5y ago
  This is a pretty big leap to be honest - and this argument can be made for nearly anything if you look for it. For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Wow, this is such a wrong way of interpreting the way things are, that you're finding offense where none was probably intended. Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British. There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys). I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.
huxflux 5y ago
I never started.
yellow_lead 5y ago
> Apple announced that it was going to replace its realistic gun emoji by a water gun emoji. Immediately afterwards, Microsoft took the opposite stance and changed its gun emoji from a toy to a genuine-looking one, arguing that it was better aligned with the Unicode standard and with users’ expectation of a gun emoji. Gotta love the rivalry
nishparadox 5y ago
The title hits home, strongly... I have rarely used emojis (let alone I don't have any social media profile, plus only conversate through mails with few people). One thing I realized is the use of emojis from the other side evokes a sense of "I don't want to see emojis...". I don't know why, but I just feel that emojis kinda make me feel that the conversation isn't "deep"; it doesn't convey the actual emotions... In hindsight, I also feel a few-word replies are often disengaging. Probably it's just me. But it's been years I haven't used emojis. I don't even have the urge to use it or see it. On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected". I guess, it's just me...
emptyparadise 5y ago
Emoji helped make most apps and websites support Unicode, which is cool. I'd rather use the little unique emoticons most forums had though. They were fun and could be personalized for each community.
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I never understood Emojis beyond the text-based smilies. I'm the one who disables "Convert my text smiley to icons" in the WordPress preferences every time I install one, ever since it was introduced. I have a 13-year old daughter, and she explained to me that my text-based smilies when converted becomes those old-school emojis. These can be interpreted in various ways by the millennials. I tried learning the new emojis and tried few times; but my daughter laughed at me, and asked me to stopped and instead she stopped using emojis with me. She texts me in full sentences while conversing with me. I was neither in the SMS-esque shortened text bandwagon. I hated texting until iPhone came out. Still never got used to emojis.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  text or die. :)
deleted 5y ago
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Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
With the rising use of emojis I think the humanity is coming full circle: almost every writing system started with a hieroglyphs, then dumping it for the obvious advantages of alphabetical writing. But now, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and a lot of communications become effectively hieroglyphical.
young_unixer 5y ago
It doesn't sit well with me that the Unicode consortium decides which emojis to approve based on moral grounds or possible consequences of their use. I have stopped using emojis because I don't want to contribute in legitimizing that.
- etripe 5y ago
  Interesting. Do you think there's no place for ethical discussions in tech, or is your objection closer to the "unelected elite" side of things?
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    The "ethics" in tech are often wrt the actions if tech companies - in this case it is the actions (communications) of tech customers (or users) and the attempts to restrict certain types of communication. Any given service could ban (real) gun emojis, but when the standard excludes it, all services must effectively operate without it.
  - young_unixer 5y ago
    There is place for ethical discussions in tech, but international standards are not the appropiate place or tool to push your push your vision of ethics.
makeitdouble 5y ago
It’s so weird the author doesn’t give any perspective on how the experiment was received on the other side. We have this one-sided evaluation of how they feel it could be perceived by the recipient, and no actual check on that. Makes it pretty hard to make any jugement on the whole thing.
deleted 5y ago
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filoeleven 5y ago
Fuck emojis. I have enough trouble interpreting the facial expressions of the real-time humans who I am conversing with, whose immediate emotional response to what I or they are saying is meaningful and important to me and which inform my own social behavior. Now you want to shrink that whole set of social cues down to a handful of pixels, with loads of cultural and meta-cultural interpretation built in, and also give respondents as much time as they want to choose some tragically and perhaps intentionally vague icon to reply with that I’m then supposed to make sense of? No. Already had that with words, thanks. Fuck emojis. Red cheeks with wide eyes and an “o” mouth means one thing, while virtually the same thing but with a purple forehead instead of the red cheeks means something entirely different? Congratulations, you’ve reified my middle school experience into a goddamned tamagotchi and I hate it. I’m not going to discuss the eggplant. Or the star or the bus or the shoe, or the juice box or the helicopter or the five (presumably) alcoholic drinks I’ve just scrolled through. Or how they only show up as suggestions while texting after you have already typed the word they symbolize and how that adds nothing to the conversation except a visual stumbling block, or how these things have NOTHING to do with emotions anymore. (Eggplant is the outlier here; even I know it’s never really used as an eggplant. And I’m angry that it can also be classified within the set of emojis that are encompassed by my first and final statement.) Fuck emojis.
- silvester23 5y ago
  The word Emoji makes it sound to an English speaker like it should have something to do with emotions (like emoticon does), but that is pure coincidence: it just means 'picture character' in Japanese (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)
  - filoeleven 5y ago
    Thanks, I did not know that.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Of course it's Japanese trying to push thousands of ideograms onto nations perfectly happy with just dozens of phonetic letters. Yeah, nope. F that.
endgame 5y ago
> We could also ask: is it even the Unicode Consortium’s role to attempt to influence the representation of violent or unethical ideas? This is literally what Newspeak was designed to do.
- endgame 5y ago
  Actually, it's worse than Newspeak, because it's retroactively editing people's writing.
deleted 5y ago
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toto444 5y ago
I write stories to teach a foreign language. Using emojis alongside the text is very helpful to help convey the meaning. That made me realize there is a property of the emojis that is rarely mentioned : they are a fairly extensive free set of consistently designed characters. And they may be the only one out there.
ehnto 5y ago
My partner didn't grow up "on the internet" like I did, and her ability to convey or perceive emotional cues that exist in the internet chat zeitgeist has been really interesting to me. Just one really small example that I think will be a good demonstration: Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive. Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context... Some of you will be thinking "Uh, that's not true." Which it's almost definitely not true for everyone, but those emotions were ubiquitously conveyed in chat networks I was part of while I was growing up and there are dozens if not hundreds of uniquely text based emotional nuance that grew out of the need to be more expressive in chat/sms/text based messages. I'd love to see a study on it since I feel it may well explain a lot of miscommunications on the internet. If you assume the person you're talking to knows the 'rules' then you could be totally misunderstanding them. My partner finishes all her sentences with a full stop and on more than one occasion I've had to remind myself not to read into it, it's just that she's not 'from the internet'.
- petters 5y ago
  I have used the internet for 25 years and I learned that ending sentences with a period is/can be rude like two years ago. That surprised me a lot. But I never used chat a lot. I think on Usenet etc., full sentences were the norm.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    It's not rude. It's something a bunch of trolls just made up. It never happened organically.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      It is. I've had a co-worker once call it "a full stop of hate", and it clicked with me immediately, and then every person to which I mentioned this phrase immediately know what I meant. I believe it did grow organically. So, in the version I know and that seems to be Internet universal, it applies to IM messaging only. You don't start sentences in uppercase, and a full stop at the end of a message is interpreted as strong, negative emphasis. Similarly, ending an IM message with ellipsis is expressing disappointment. It can be productively used if it's obvious that the disappointment is not with your interlocutor (e.g. "these politicians..."). I personally know a (non-tech-savvy, so not a nerd bias) person who walked up to her coworker and very sternly asked she stops sending her messages ending with ellipsis, because it reads as if she constantly had some grudge.
DevKoala 5y ago
I believe that some emojis devolve the language while others advance it, same as certain slang words or portions of a dialect. I personally don’t use emoji’s, but I am open to use words or emojis that allow us to describe more concepts in a concise manner.
- fbcpck 5y ago
  I observed something related to what you've said. In some casual/private Discord channels I frequent, there's usually a couple emojis that gets used a lot, that on its own have none or extremely ambiguous meaning. For most of them, I find it almost impossible to describe the meaning in words, yet at the same time everyone understands and acknowledges that it is not superfluous / that it conveys something. We talked about these emojis and the best description we could come up with was that these are filler emojis. The primary purpose is to de-escalate the seriousness tone of a message, which by default is pretty serious for text-based messages. Think about how a message may come up as rude if it ends with a period (.) and without, then add another level after that; this is what the filler emoji does. Aside from the seriousness de-escalation, we think it also helps with the tempo/pace of the conversation, similar to how in verbal conversation you pause/leave a gap when talking, as a cue for when other people can respond. The filler emoji here is that pause. To (outside) observers unable to understand/confused by the meaning of the (singular) filler emoji, this can easily be seen as devolving the language, but I'd argue that it actually conveys something very complex extremely concisely with one emoji.
KaiserPro 5y ago
OLD MAN OPINION I grew up using MSN messenger, Me and my friends used to spend way to much time extra viruses to get more emoticons. However the one thing that stayed with me was how cheap emojis can make things look. Unless its a slack reaction, but they were almost always custom. So I don't use emojis in a standard day. But I suspect that says more about me, rather than anyone else.
- sambeau 5y ago
  My old man opinion is that you should probably reconsider as I believe our online arguing has gone way down since we started using emoji in the workplace. Emoji are a useful tool to prevent misunderstanding. Tone, especially aggression, is difficult to express in short text form and so much of short business-oriented messaging looks curt and aggressive.
  - silly-silly 5y ago
    My old man opinion is that there is no point discussing with people who are using emoji because they are inadequately able to express themselves using words. I have found they are also likely to take offense and act irrationally when words are the forced medium.
    - oblio 5y ago
      You're just being silly(-silly). Normal communication has probably 1000x the bandwidth of text communication. Any extra bandwidth you can add and not overdo, for written communication, is useful. I use emojis, maybe one every 500 words or so, and they do offer added value.
      - silly-silly 5y ago
        By normal, do you mean verbal ?
    - matsemann 5y ago
      You sound hostile, try incorporating some emojis.
schwartzworld 5y ago
I thought emojis were cheesy for a long time. I had a boss who had better people skills than me (not in tech) and she recommended I start using them. She said my emails come across as very serious and sometimes the tone she knows I have when talking is lost. She felt emojis softened everything and made it more casual. Damn if she wasn't right. Often I write something I need to say, then realize it could be interpreted as mean or aggressive rather than funny and casual like I intended. Cue the emoji
- sambeau 5y ago
  This is my experience too. Our company has become a much more relaxed and friendly place since we embraced emoji.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Emojis in email in a business context? Maybe I'm just too old, or maybe it's because I don't work at some dreadful valley startup, but anyone at my company using emoji in a work email would probably get treated like a child and not taken seriously.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    Maybe you and your company should try emojis to get rid of the hostility..?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I'm not being hostile, I'm being descriptive of the business culture I know. I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where you wouldn't be looked down on for using emoji in an email. This post is the first I've ever heard of such a thing being acceptable practice.
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    Your company sounds like a shitty place to work.
sambeau 5y ago
I don't need to experiment with not using emoji. I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. In those days all online discussions became a huge argument very quickly. Passive-aggressive memos with bosses cc'ed in flew about constantly. In-person meetings were hastily convened on a regular basis to sort things out. Usually all that needed sorted out was a stupid misunderstanding, and the root cause was usually a misreading of tone followed by an emotional overreaction somewhere in the chain of emails. My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider. I am firmly of the opinion that emoji are incredibly useful and that normal speech is full of emotion and playfulness that hastily written text cannot convey. You should therefore be using them in your workplace. If you don't use emoji you will be misunderstood. No matter how well written your prose is the recipients may only have time to skim-read it. Using emoji are, in my opinion, very 'professional'.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Why don't people use emojiis or their substitute in this place? :) (っ. ᴗ .)っ I'm not sure if the unicode ones work? edits: ஐ
  - krapp 5y ago
    For the same reason telling jokes is frowned upon, and why casual projects posted to Show HN often get criticized for being trivial. Hacker News considers itself serious business to a fault. And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it.
    - everyone 5y ago
      Well HN users are powerful scions of business. They're gonna change the world with their web-apps. No time for distracting fun or unorthodox thoughts.
      - 5y ago
Yizahi 5y ago
An interesting trend is happening in Telegram (maybe not only there). Telegram on all platforms natively supports so called "stickers", basically a picture which replaces emoji. They are custom made by users and client supports seamless adding new packs to your library with a single click. Once a good pack is introduced first time in a chat it spreads like a virus if it is interesting enough. And bad packs are silently ignored. So, these sticker packs have effectively replaced any emoji other than generic smiley, because emojis today are simply bad. Looking at them it feels like a kindergarten book. Stickers on the other hand can be anything you want - sarcastic, offensive, insulting, dumb etc.
- herbst 5y ago
  I am so glad that I witness stickers as addition and not replacement. I get where you are coming from, and I have a huge collection on telegram for every possible moment (and thausands of sexual ones I barely use) But the majority of moji I see is gladly still emoji. Edit:// however check Bitmoji to see how far we've gone with stickers already :)
xorcist 5y ago
Not sure if this shows my age, but emojis are problematic because the perceived intent change with age and context. One trivial example being the basic laughing smiley. For me who integrated them in my nervous system when all of them had noses, they convey a humorous undertone. So "you are kind ;)" would read as "you are kind -- nah, just kidding!". I must pause when reading them to re-program myself not to see them sarcastically because I know most people don't mean it that way. Almost every kind of happy emoji seems to be a universal way of showing good intentions. It wasn't any easier when they crept into professional communications but here we are. Just something to be aware of I guess.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  To be fair to emoji, all language changes with context. Just look at the differences between, say, UK English and US English. Is someone who's 'pissed' angry or drunk?
samuell 5y ago
:)
Sirikon 5y ago
Imagine an article saying "I stopped using 'thanks' and 'sorry'". Same results. Emojis are part of the language now.
diogenesjunior 5y ago
reddit moment
kidsil 5y ago
I was fine with the common IRC emojis: :) :| :\ :( :O :D XD :P and an occasional @_@
DonHopkins 5y ago
>What we saw was, if you go too far in that [representational] direction because you want to be inclusive, people don’t see themselves represented and they’re not going to use it. You have to have enough specificity to represent you enough, but not so inclusive that your emoji palette is hundreds of thousands of emoji. Scott McCloud wrote a whole book about this: "Understanding Comics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics >One of the book's key concepts is that of "masking," a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration) >The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily. Scott McCloud and Will Wright discussed masking and other issues in their 2002 GDC discussion, "When Maps Collide": https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022567/When-Maps-Collide-A-Conversation https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022567/When-Maps-Collide-A-Co... Understanding Comics and masking influenced The Sims 1 graphics architecture and design (using detailed pre-rendered 2d+z sprites for the environment and simplistic real time 3d graphics for the people), which fortunately ran fast on the common un-accelerated 3d graphics hardware of the time (greatly expanding the user base), and synergistically enabled user created content (which was essential to its success) which I described in this earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676313 >Going 3D at that time in history meant that the quality of the graphic would take a huge hit, as well as the rendering speed, and fewer people would be able to run it because it would require a high end computer, so it was just not worth it. >Using 2D pre-rendered sprites means that the artists can use as many polygons, rich textures and lighting techniques as they want in 3D Studio Max, and tweak them until the sprites look perfect, and that's exactly what the user sees. You just could not approach anywhere near that quality with 3D graphics at the time. Of course things are a lot different now! >That was during the time that The Sims was also in development. One reason The Sims was successful is that it did not try to be full 3D, and ran well on low-end computers (the old computer that little sister inherits from big brother when he upgrades to a gaming machine). It used a hybrid 2D/3D system of z-buffered sprites, with an orthographic projection constrained to four rotations, three zooms, and only the characters were rendered with polygons into the pre-rendered z-buffered scene, using DirectX's software renderer. >I developed the character animation system and content creation tools for The Sims, and when the EA executives were reviewing the technology to decide if they should buy Maxis, to justify our approach I bought them a copy of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, which explained a concept called "masking" -- http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anime_links/mccloud.html http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anim... >Hergé's Tintin comics are a great example of how that works: The idea is that by making the background environment very realistic (i.e. rich pre-rendered sprites from high poly models), and the characters themselves more abstract (i.e. efficient real time 3d texture mapped low poly models), the readers (players) can more easily project themselves into the scene and identify with the characters. Much in the same way an abstract happy face can represent everyone, while a photograph of a person's face only represents that person. >The other fortunate consequence was that it was easy for players to create their own characters and objects by editing the textures and sprites with 2D tools like Photoshop, without requiring difficult 3D modeling tools like 3D Studio Max, so that enabled a lot of user created content by kids instead of professional artists, which was essential to the success of the game.
deleted 5y ago
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dolmen 5y ago
I Stopped Using Emojis When I Posted On HN.
throwawaycuriou 5y ago
The author's reflections after stopping using emoji: "In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile." This helped me make a connection to a larger phenomenon in changing speech, something which I struggle with. Emojis a way of communicating with loose precision. There are also analogous ways to do so while using words. And there are speakers in their daily speech which greatly lean into the saftey of loose precision to the point of subterfurge and agression. A 'like' softens all opinion. A 'you know' coerces the listener to agree. A 'whatever' implies others' priorities are misplaced. An 'uh' or 'um' is a don't interrupt me! Overreliance on ambiguous prounouns. 'Stuff' or 'Thing'. I find these mechanisms off putting. They sometimes correlate with paranoia, esteem issues, or sociopathy. So I try to avoid such speakers if possible, since I feel like an asshole to point it out. It's ok to wait until your thoughts are formed. It's ok to be incorrect. Pick your target and try to hit it. If you communicate with loose precision or emoji you inhibit building knowledge together.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. Actually, I think the ambiguity can be an advantage. One interesting thing I noticed in communicating in a foreign language is that sometimes, I'll feel like either of two meanings might be appropriate -- and the other language has a word that might have either sense. It always feels like a big win to use that word when that happens. On the other hand, I used to message someone frequently who would use really weird emoji like a pig face, and who steadfastly refused to ever explain what any of them meant. That got annoying.
whalesalad 5y ago
Now we all need to collectively stop using the Poppins typeface.
rthomas6 5y ago
So it's strange that I already don't use emojis? Sometimes I will write "haha" or ":)" in chats, and that's about it. That was all I needed when I was in my 20s, and I see no need to change that in my 30s. It probably helps that I don't have social media, except HN and occasionally Reddit. I didn't know this made me an outlier. Whenever someone uses a lot of emojis, I assume they are young, or wanting to seem young.
gaudat 5y ago
Stickers are the superior choice. Check out LINE where users can customize their stickers with their own captions. Or Telegram where users discover stickers from other users rather than a central store.
nkotov 5y ago
I’m 27, went through a later part of my teen years with an iPhone. I’m not big on emojis and neither are most of my friends. Every once in a while I might use it to add a “feeling” but most of the time, I just don’t use it.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
>When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? I don't remember ever using an emoji. Are emoji such an integral part of text communication that not using them is surprising?
npteljes 5y ago
I don't like Emojis too much, but I'm fascinated by Unicode, it representations, and how creatively people abuse it, to create faces for example. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
JohnFen 5y ago
I use two or three emojis, but my problem with them is that I can rarely be confident that I know what they mean when others use them.

194 points by JonathanBuchh 5y ago

"language has grammar - with nouns and verbs - which isn’t the case of emoji" I'd definitively argue there certainly can be verbs, the best example coming to mind is the arrow. Also, am I the only one who likes to construct entire silly rebus sentences out of emoji?

mirekrusin 5y ago

Rainbows and other crap on ie. github project readme more often than not makes the whole thing look like three-ring circus mess.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Some people add them after nouns on their Facebook updates, e.g. my last sentence would have the "man and woman" emoji after the word "people". So their posts look like my kindergarten worksheet where we had to complete sentences by identifying the pictures and filling in the blank space next to them.

veltas 5y ago

Reading about how they have carefully designed the pictures to prevent people from communicating certain things, it reminds me of the language in Orwell's 1984 which was a simplistic and limited language designed to make it impossible to dissent.

literalsunbear 5y ago
oh my god come on man
- veltas 5y ago
  If you mention 1984 at all today, the anti-1984 police will come and complain that you'd dare compare anything in modern society to the dystopia in the book, even though I wasn't implying there was any repression. To me it's just an interesting similarity.
  - literalsunbear 5y ago
    read a new book, i'm begging you
    - veltas 5y ago
      I enjoy the prospect of finding out what novels you think are better or more suitable.
whateveracct 5y ago
have you considered that emojis are a lot of fun and can add to your "voice"?
- veltas 5y ago
  What did I say? I was just saying they literally tried to prevent you from saying specific things with the designs of the icons, and made the connection. I didn't say they weren't fun.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Have you considered that "fun" and "communication" are two different words and neither of them is in any way dependent on the other?
cgrealy 5y ago
The important difference is that newspeak was designed to replace language whereas emojis supplement it. There are plenty of emojis that can be used to express dissent, skepticism or even out right anger.
- veltas 5y ago
  And as a general advantage emoji isn't trying to replace words. Nobody is (as far as I know) required to use emoji. People can pick and choose when they want them.
  - xdennis 5y ago
    The point is that it's a political choice to give people the ability to communicate through emojis while removing it from others (e.g. the gun example).
- xdennis 5y ago
  Weren't Unicode emojis designed to replace image emoticons?
jazzyjackson 5y ago
OTOH its a dictionary of ideograms that gets extended every year in a fairly democratic way: anyone can suggest or propose an emoji, which is quite different than the English Oxford Dictionary.

xiphias2 5y ago

Emojis are extremely useful for personality matching on Tinder. My favourite is the non-smoking emoji as I would never date a person who is smoking, but there are many other things that I love in life and emojis give me a way to communicate them visually.

terom 5y ago
Interesting, given the examples in this article and [1] of confusion and miscommunication caused by differences in how different platforms depict the same emoji. So in the context of online dating, does that mean that humans are now selecting for the best compatibility between users of the same mobile platforms? :) I can see how some apps decided to switch to their own emoji sets... [1] https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojipedia-lookups-at-all-time-high/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojipedia-lookups-at-all-time-h...

29athrowaway 5y ago

Emojis are a way to standardize expressions of sentiment so that your text is easier to parse by intelligence services /s. Humor aside... they may reduce network bandwidth, they reduce the need for inline images, etc.

bussierem 5y ago

I don't want to just jump in with some negative comment here but let's start with being honest - 95% of this post is about the history of emojis, how to use them, and what they mean. Which is a helluva lot of information about emojis for an article that concludes that they enjoyed NOT using emojis, and doesn't really have any substantive conclusion to make about things or any follow up.

reaperducer 5y ago
Like so many web sites and blog posts, it's nothing more than keyword stuffing. Trolling for Google clicks rather than imparting information.
insickness 5y ago
Without unnecessary information about the history of emojis, this would have been the entire article: -------------- When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? How about a week? In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour. Here’s what I wanted to find out: How does the lack of emoji affect my conversations with others? Will other aspects of my interactions be affected? My hypothesis was “I will somehow want to compensate for the lack of emoji.” So, what did happen when I stopped using emojis? On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote: “This is actually cool, I don't know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.” No shit, Sherlock. In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean. In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile. Ever since my 2-week experiment ended, and I started operating with emojis again, I’ve been paying more attention to what I write. I prefer using emoji on top of self-sufficient phrasing. I want to make sure that my messages are clear enough without emoji, and only then might I add one, spending it on expendable flair rather than something meaning is reliant on. I wholeheartedly invite you to carry out this experiment for yourself. Who knows what fantastic feeling or intriguing behaviour you might uncover?

vangelis 5y ago

I do wish apps (looking at you Slack and Teams) would stop converting my emoticons into emojis. I want :) not . edit: HackerNews strips render emoji. It should be this: https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/

jazzyjackson 5y ago
The kids started reversing the smile once software started auto-converting (:
- reaperducer 5y ago
  So he should use "vv?"
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I didn't get the reference until I circled back to the read the link vangelis posted. this is where I'd use the clapping emoji
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    I had no idea ^^ was an emoticon. I've been using it for years as a way to say "this."
    - aulin 5y ago
      I always used to point out something in the line/sentence above... When did it change to a smile?!
      - csande17 5y ago
        Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though. The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.

sys_64738 5y ago

Smily faces forever. You can keep your emoji junk.

deleted 5y ago
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systemvoltage 5y ago

Emojis are fine in text messages and IM/Slack. I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. I just find them distracting since they stand out strongly in a block of text - eyes instantly gravitate to colorful emojis in a rather smooth flow of text.

dnautics 5y ago
There's some emojis I don't mind in prs, like rocketship for deploy and the worm for bug fixes
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  haha, that rocketship is forever associated with r/wallstreetbets and "To the moon" meme for me.
  - justshowpost 5y ago
    Well, investors were always referring to the steep, high momentum upward trend as a rocket..
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ykat7 5y ago
> I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. Completely agree. I also find emoji in commit messages [1] to be far more ambiguous than their text equivalents. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

pyrophane 5y ago

Emojis solve the problem of texting being inefficient at the expense of ceding a lot of the expressiveness to someone else. Suddenly committees are deciding what you mean. Turns out that for a lot of people, thats fine.

WalterBright 5y ago
> committees are deciding what you mean Not any different from using the alphabet and words.
- sebmellen 5y ago
  Very different, in fact. Yes, language is socially and culturally determined, but it is incredibly organic and expressive. A small counsel of people deciding which emotions can be expressed, and how, is entirely different. 1984 taught us the dangers of a limited and/or artificially created vocabulary. Are the lessons not the same today?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    People impute alternate meanings to words all the time. Such as "nasty" being flipped to meaning "cool". There's nothing constraining people from using emojis to mean things different from what they are defined to be. For example, the wallstreetbets subreddit has their own local meanings for various icons. Note that all alphabets started out as emojis. The vocabulary was, of course, very limited, and the emojis gradually got shortened, simplified, and turned into a sound, then stringing the sounds together meant a rich set of words could be formed. Did you know that the letter 'A' was originally a picture of a bull's head?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    It's like the internet method to convey body language
  - duckmysick 5y ago
    Many languages have small counsels of people that act as an authority on their vocabulary and usage. The French Academy, for example, has 40 members.

delgaudm 5y ago

I wonder if this this is a generational thing or what other factors are at play: My peer group and I might use the occasional smiley, but it is exceeding rare that I would use any emoji for anything. I also don't see many emojis in messages to me.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I'm sure it's a generational thing. The only place I actually see a lot of emoji use is stuff reposted on Reddit, usually corporate twitter accounts and MLM marketeers.
johnisgood 5y ago
Not an emoji, but an emoticon in a message to you: xD

neilv 5y ago

The main use I have for emoji is in the emoji-reactions in the Slack that we have to use at my current company. The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response that doesn't interrupt people with a notification (like a message would). They'll see the response when they return to the view.

Tepix 5y ago
Exactly this. Acknowledging a message, confirming that you are working on it, giving brief feedback (yes/no) without interrupting
mastazi 5y ago
The thing that makes me sad about Slack emoji reactions is that across Windows and Mac users, Slack defaults to a different emoji for the check mark. In particular the default check mark that Windows users will be invited to use, is hard to see if the receiver is using a dark theme on their device. Note: this was a few months ago, my company switched to a different platform so maybe it's been fixed in the meantime
berkes 5y ago
> that doesn't interrupt people with a notification [...] The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response Isn't the entire premiss of Slack that it is asynchronous? That it does not interrupt the flow in the way a phonecall or tap-on-shoulder does? What went wrong that now the senders of communication have to -again- tread carefully, be aware of the receivers status and work, employ kludges, so not to interrupt co-workers?

mch82 5y ago

I love the core set of smiley face emoji, but skip most of the rest because they’re either too hard to find or too easy to misunderstand. I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… Any good articles out there on that topic? As an amateur observer of languages, it seems like the purpose & grammar of the emoji set isn’t well enough defined. Maybe some of the emoji are adjectives & should only appear once a verb or noun emoji is picked… Maybe “watermelon” should be a compound of “water” and “melon”… Are there any notable emoji keyboard experiments out there? I wonder if anyone has tried organizing emoji like a Chinese keyboard (which I have seen & used, but may misunderstand since I don’t read Chinese).

bradrn 5y ago
> I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words But in combination, they can represent many more, surely, just like hieroglyphs or Chinese characters?
  - bradrn 5y ago
    Sure, but in that case you’d need to have some sort of convention for what each combination represents, and at that point you’ve basically invented a whole new writing system based on emoji. As I said previously: > Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.

stordoff 5y ago

Part of this article touches on why I don't use emoji[1] - I don't know what they will look to the recipient most of the time. At least with emoticons/kaomoji, I have a decent idea. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter, but I can see it causing a miscommunication in some circumstances. [1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.

Tepix 5y ago
Is that really a big issue? Most of the standard emoji look the same pretty much everywhere.
spidersouris 5y ago
Both are used[1]. TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats-the-plural-of-emoji-emojis/422763/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats...
ykat7 5y ago
> "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese. Yep, I prefer "emoji" given the zero plural in Japanese. I don't think there's a consensus though. For example, Apple uses "emoji" [1], Emojipedia uses "emojis" [2], and the OED includes both [3]. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145 [2]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios-14-5/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios... [3]: https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343 https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343
spacechild1 5y ago
If a word is borrowed from another language and becomes common place, you can use the plural form of your language. Do you say “5 pizzas“ or “5 pizze“? A notable exception are Latin words, e.g. index -> indices (if you want oto sound well educated). The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form) EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!

toastal 5y ago

One thing I really dislike is the aesthetics of the Apple emoji. One could say "then don't use it", but so many sites and apps are shipping an entire emoji set. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter who have made their own brand of emoji, a lot of apps are just shipping Google or Microsoft or Apple's and instead of matching your system, it completely clashes and is a waste of bandwidth. If you're on Linux, it's a total dice roll which their design team should be the 'default'.

js8 5y ago

I actually went a step further and stopped using words, because it turns out people also interpret them differently. Some people, for example, cannot read sarcasm. Now I use sequent calculus, and make sure that every term is well-defined before I use it.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
...After reading the first half of your comment, I thought you were serious. Only after the second half did it finally dawn on me that you were probably being sarcastic. Seriously.
- anthonypasq 5y ago
  not surprising considering it seems 75% of the users here are mildly autistic
- blooalien 5y ago
  Good job reading the entire comment and using context to suss out the likely meaning and intent behind the words. That's actually a pretty rare skill these days in many parts of the Internet. ;) (Seriously.)
jdgoesmarching 5y ago
Sorry, I’m gonna need you to start over with 5,000 words on the history of words before I can process this joke.
- romwell 5y ago
  Be sure to include the considerations that went into standardizing the spellings to make sure that we can't express dangerous ideas with doubleplusungood words.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    god can you imagine living with a standards-enforcing AI that takes your speech and makes sure to convert it to known-safe dictionary words?

veltas 5y ago

I recently found that having emoji fonts breaks my terminal. This bug will probably eventually be fixed so I didn't think too hard before removing emoji from my system. I don't use them myself and personally have not noticed them ever being used with a decent signal-to-noise ratio. I have come to associate them with snide or political remarks on Twitter and clickbait articles. I agree with the author that when people use emoji they are leaving large parts of their intent and feelings ambiguous and can be more specific (and will force themselves to think more about what they are really trying to convey) with textual messages.

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

Something I found interesting in the emoji usages in China: 1. In Wechat "emoji" is a superset that also includes memes, where you can use any kind of image as an emoji also add other's emoji to your library (kinda like slack emoji, but bigger and more emphasized). The humor and expressiveness is immense, people use them for daily conversations instead of a quick reaction tool (well that too). Everyone's emoji lib is vastly different and it says a lot about you as a person, it's almost like a personal language. 2. The "Smile" emoji in Wechat actually means hostility [0] in younger generations ("it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you"). Some older generations folks don't "get" it and still use them for good intent. It's always weird to see your parents send you that. [0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3029091/smiley-face-emoji-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-does-china https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3029091/smiley-face...

sho 5y ago
Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. The "plain smile" emoji is rarely used with friends, in favour of laughter-focused images, which I don't think is unique to Wechat.
- ggm 5y ago
  > Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. This is where things get complicated: How can I know you're right and they're wrong? Thats no different to indirect references to things and people: so "dear leader" is understood to refer to the DPRK but in fact, contextually can be used to refer to any upward manager. The inherent ambiguity of meaning is a problem in all communication and across both words, and shapes, it's meaning is highly contextual, and I would suggest fluid: in 5 years time this specific wechat emoji/emoticon meaning will have shifted. "fab" probably had about 4-5 years of real currency in the 1960s. Now, its use is mostly confined to the near geriatrics or ironically. (and, to kids who watch "thunderbirds" F.A.B. probably lacks context)
  - rob74 5y ago

c01n 5y ago

Emojis are awesome, some of things are very difficult to express in text. I like how ancient Egypt wrote in diagrams.

asiachick 5y ago

I tend to find people who don't like emoji to be slightly racist. Given emoji started in Japan, they get this "ewww, who wants the foreign shit in my text". Even HN is slightly racist on this front. The fact that an entire culture embraced them and that you reject them is not racism with a capital R but is arguably in the gray area of, probably unintended, micro aggressions. You're basically telling an entire culture to go F themselves. If you don't like racism tag, then how about sexism. I'm pretty confident women use more emoji than men and I've seen plenty of female engineer's tech blog posts showing lots of emoji in their terminal prompts etc. So, assuming I'm correct, not supporting them is arguably sexist since you're effectively telling women "sorry, your preferred mode of expressing yourself is disallowed." I get that the blog post is about not using them personally and that's of course 100% fine. But if you're judging people on if they use them or not, or if you're making systems that don't support them, please reconsider.

uniqueid 5y ago
We're talking about peppering one's writing with brightly colored little pictures. If a dislike of that is anything, it's ageist: I don't want the way I write to give people the impression that I'm a ten year old.
zylent 5y ago
This is a pretty big leap to be honest - and this argument can be made for nearly anything if you look for it. For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Wow, this is such a wrong way of interpreting the way things are, that you're finding offense where none was probably intended. Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British. There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys). I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.

huxflux 5y ago

I never started.

yellow_lead 5y ago

> Apple announced that it was going to replace its realistic gun emoji by a water gun emoji. Immediately afterwards, Microsoft took the opposite stance and changed its gun emoji from a toy to a genuine-looking one, arguing that it was better aligned with the Unicode standard and with users’ expectation of a gun emoji. Gotta love the rivalry

nishparadox 5y ago

The title hits home, strongly... I have rarely used emojis (let alone I don't have any social media profile, plus only conversate through mails with few people). One thing I realized is the use of emojis from the other side evokes a sense of "I don't want to see emojis...". I don't know why, but I just feel that emojis kinda make me feel that the conversation isn't "deep"; it doesn't convey the actual emotions... In hindsight, I also feel a few-word replies are often disengaging. Probably it's just me. But it's been years I haven't used emojis. I don't even have the urge to use it or see it. On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected". I guess, it's just me...

emptyparadise 5y ago

Emoji helped make most apps and websites support Unicode, which is cool. I'd rather use the little unique emoticons most forums had though. They were fun and could be personalized for each community.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I never understood Emojis beyond the text-based smilies. I'm the one who disables "Convert my text smiley to icons" in the WordPress preferences every time I install one, ever since it was introduced. I have a 13-year old daughter, and she explained to me that my text-based smilies when converted becomes those old-school emojis. These can be interpreted in various ways by the millennials. I tried learning the new emojis and tried few times; but my daughter laughed at me, and asked me to stopped and instead she stopped using emojis with me. She texts me in full sentences while conversing with me. I was neither in the SMS-esque shortened text bandwagon. I hated texting until iPhone came out. Still never got used to emojis.

SubiculumCode 5y ago
text or die. :)

deleted 5y ago

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Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

With the rising use of emojis I think the humanity is coming full circle: almost every writing system started with a hieroglyphs, then dumping it for the obvious advantages of alphabetical writing. But now, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and a lot of communications become effectively hieroglyphical.

young_unixer 5y ago

It doesn't sit well with me that the Unicode consortium decides which emojis to approve based on moral grounds or possible consequences of their use. I have stopped using emojis because I don't want to contribute in legitimizing that.

etripe 5y ago
Interesting. Do you think there's no place for ethical discussions in tech, or is your objection closer to the "unelected elite" side of things?
- Chris2048 5y ago
  The "ethics" in tech are often wrt the actions if tech companies - in this case it is the actions (communications) of tech customers (or users) and the attempts to restrict certain types of communication. Any given service could ban (real) gun emojis, but when the standard excludes it, all services must effectively operate without it.
- young_unixer 5y ago
  There is place for ethical discussions in tech, but international standards are not the appropiate place or tool to push your push your vision of ethics.

makeitdouble 5y ago

It’s so weird the author doesn’t give any perspective on how the experiment was received on the other side. We have this one-sided evaluation of how they feel it could be perceived by the recipient, and no actual check on that. Makes it pretty hard to make any jugement on the whole thing.

deleted 5y ago

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filoeleven 5y ago

Fuck emojis. I have enough trouble interpreting the facial expressions of the real-time humans who I am conversing with, whose immediate emotional response to what I or they are saying is meaningful and important to me and which inform my own social behavior. Now you want to shrink that whole set of social cues down to a handful of pixels, with loads of cultural and meta-cultural interpretation built in, and also give respondents as much time as they want to choose some tragically and perhaps intentionally vague icon to reply with that I’m then supposed to make sense of? No. Already had that with words, thanks. Fuck emojis. Red cheeks with wide eyes and an “o” mouth means one thing, while virtually the same thing but with a purple forehead instead of the red cheeks means something entirely different? Congratulations, you’ve reified my middle school experience into a goddamned tamagotchi and I hate it. I’m not going to discuss the eggplant. Or the star or the bus or the shoe, or the juice box or the helicopter or the five (presumably) alcoholic drinks I’ve just scrolled through. Or how they only show up as suggestions while texting after you have already typed the word they symbolize and how that adds nothing to the conversation except a visual stumbling block, or how these things have NOTHING to do with emotions anymore. (Eggplant is the outlier here; even I know it’s never really used as an eggplant. And I’m angry that it can also be classified within the set of emojis that are encompassed by my first and final statement.) Fuck emojis.

silvester23 5y ago
The word Emoji makes it sound to an English speaker like it should have something to do with emotions (like emoticon does), but that is pure coincidence: it just means 'picture character' in Japanese (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)
- filoeleven 5y ago
  Thanks, I did not know that.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Of course it's Japanese trying to push thousands of ideograms onto nations perfectly happy with just dozens of phonetic letters. Yeah, nope. F that.

endgame 5y ago

> We could also ask: is it even the Unicode Consortium’s role to attempt to influence the representation of violent or unethical ideas? This is literally what Newspeak was designed to do.

endgame 5y ago
Actually, it's worse than Newspeak, because it's retroactively editing people's writing.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toto444 5y ago

I write stories to teach a foreign language. Using emojis alongside the text is very helpful to help convey the meaning. That made me realize there is a property of the emojis that is rarely mentioned : they are a fairly extensive free set of consistently designed characters. And they may be the only one out there.

ehnto 5y ago

My partner didn't grow up "on the internet" like I did, and her ability to convey or perceive emotional cues that exist in the internet chat zeitgeist has been really interesting to me. Just one really small example that I think will be a good demonstration: Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive. Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context... Some of you will be thinking "Uh, that's not true." Which it's almost definitely not true for everyone, but those emotions were ubiquitously conveyed in chat networks I was part of while I was growing up and there are dozens if not hundreds of uniquely text based emotional nuance that grew out of the need to be more expressive in chat/sms/text based messages. I'd love to see a study on it since I feel it may well explain a lot of miscommunications on the internet. If you assume the person you're talking to knows the 'rules' then you could be totally misunderstanding them. My partner finishes all her sentences with a full stop and on more than one occasion I've had to remind myself not to read into it, it's just that she's not 'from the internet'.

petters 5y ago
I have used the internet for 25 years and I learned that ending sentences with a period is/can be rude like two years ago. That surprised me a lot. But I never used chat a lot. I think on Usenet etc., full sentences were the norm.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  It's not rude. It's something a bunch of trolls just made up. It never happened organically.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    It is. I've had a co-worker once call it "a full stop of hate", and it clicked with me immediately, and then every person to which I mentioned this phrase immediately know what I meant. I believe it did grow organically. So, in the version I know and that seems to be Internet universal, it applies to IM messaging only. You don't start sentences in uppercase, and a full stop at the end of a message is interpreted as strong, negative emphasis. Similarly, ending an IM message with ellipsis is expressing disappointment. It can be productively used if it's obvious that the disappointment is not with your interlocutor (e.g. "these politicians..."). I personally know a (non-tech-savvy, so not a nerd bias) person who walked up to her coworker and very sternly asked she stops sending her messages ending with ellipsis, because it reads as if she constantly had some grudge.

DevKoala 5y ago

I believe that some emojis devolve the language while others advance it, same as certain slang words or portions of a dialect. I personally don’t use emoji’s, but I am open to use words or emojis that allow us to describe more concepts in a concise manner.

fbcpck 5y ago
I observed something related to what you've said. In some casual/private Discord channels I frequent, there's usually a couple emojis that gets used a lot, that on its own have none or extremely ambiguous meaning. For most of them, I find it almost impossible to describe the meaning in words, yet at the same time everyone understands and acknowledges that it is not superfluous / that it conveys something. We talked about these emojis and the best description we could come up with was that these are filler emojis. The primary purpose is to de-escalate the seriousness tone of a message, which by default is pretty serious for text-based messages. Think about how a message may come up as rude if it ends with a period (.) and without, then add another level after that; this is what the filler emoji does. Aside from the seriousness de-escalation, we think it also helps with the tempo/pace of the conversation, similar to how in verbal conversation you pause/leave a gap when talking, as a cue for when other people can respond. The filler emoji here is that pause. To (outside) observers unable to understand/confused by the meaning of the (singular) filler emoji, this can easily be seen as devolving the language, but I'd argue that it actually conveys something very complex extremely concisely with one emoji.

KaiserPro 5y ago

OLD MAN OPINION I grew up using MSN messenger, Me and my friends used to spend way to much time extra viruses to get more emoticons. However the one thing that stayed with me was how cheap emojis can make things look. Unless its a slack reaction, but they were almost always custom. So I don't use emojis in a standard day. But I suspect that says more about me, rather than anyone else.

sambeau 5y ago
My old man opinion is that you should probably reconsider as I believe our online arguing has gone way down since we started using emoji in the workplace. Emoji are a useful tool to prevent misunderstanding. Tone, especially aggression, is difficult to express in short text form and so much of short business-oriented messaging looks curt and aggressive.
- silly-silly 5y ago
  My old man opinion is that there is no point discussing with people who are using emoji because they are inadequately able to express themselves using words. I have found they are also likely to take offense and act irrationally when words are the forced medium.
  - oblio 5y ago
    You're just being silly(-silly). Normal communication has probably 1000x the bandwidth of text communication. Any extra bandwidth you can add and not overdo, for written communication, is useful. I use emojis, maybe one every 500 words or so, and they do offer added value.
    - silly-silly 5y ago
      By normal, do you mean verbal ?
  - matsemann 5y ago
    You sound hostile, try incorporating some emojis.

schwartzworld 5y ago

I thought emojis were cheesy for a long time. I had a boss who had better people skills than me (not in tech) and she recommended I start using them. She said my emails come across as very serious and sometimes the tone she knows I have when talking is lost. She felt emojis softened everything and made it more casual. Damn if she wasn't right. Often I write something I need to say, then realize it could be interpreted as mean or aggressive rather than funny and casual like I intended. Cue the emoji

sambeau 5y ago
This is my experience too. Our company has become a much more relaxed and friendly place since we embraced emoji.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Emojis in email in a business context? Maybe I'm just too old, or maybe it's because I don't work at some dreadful valley startup, but anyone at my company using emoji in a work email would probably get treated like a child and not taken seriously.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Maybe you and your company should try emojis to get rid of the hostility..?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I'm not being hostile, I'm being descriptive of the business culture I know. I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where you wouldn't be looked down on for using emoji in an email. This post is the first I've ever heard of such a thing being acceptable practice.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Your company sounds like a shitty place to work.

sambeau 5y ago

I don't need to experiment with not using emoji. I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. In those days all online discussions became a huge argument very quickly. Passive-aggressive memos with bosses cc'ed in flew about constantly. In-person meetings were hastily convened on a regular basis to sort things out. Usually all that needed sorted out was a stupid misunderstanding, and the root cause was usually a misreading of tone followed by an emotional overreaction somewhere in the chain of emails. My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider. I am firmly of the opinion that emoji are incredibly useful and that normal speech is full of emotion and playfulness that hastily written text cannot convey. You should therefore be using them in your workplace. If you don't use emoji you will be misunderstood. No matter how well written your prose is the recipients may only have time to skim-read it. Using emoji are, in my opinion, very 'professional'.

thinkingemote 5y ago
Why don't people use emojiis or their substitute in this place? :) (っ. ᴗ .)っ I'm not sure if the unicode ones work? edits: ஐ
- krapp 5y ago
  For the same reason telling jokes is frowned upon, and why casual projects posted to Show HN often get criticized for being trivial. Hacker News considers itself serious business to a fault. And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it.
  - everyone 5y ago
    Well HN users are powerful scions of business. They're gonna change the world with their web-apps. No time for distracting fun or unorthodox thoughts.
    - 5y ago

Yizahi 5y ago

An interesting trend is happening in Telegram (maybe not only there). Telegram on all platforms natively supports so called "stickers", basically a picture which replaces emoji. They are custom made by users and client supports seamless adding new packs to your library with a single click. Once a good pack is introduced first time in a chat it spreads like a virus if it is interesting enough. And bad packs are silently ignored. So, these sticker packs have effectively replaced any emoji other than generic smiley, because emojis today are simply bad. Looking at them it feels like a kindergarten book. Stickers on the other hand can be anything you want - sarcastic, offensive, insulting, dumb etc.

herbst 5y ago
I am so glad that I witness stickers as addition and not replacement. I get where you are coming from, and I have a huge collection on telegram for every possible moment (and thausands of sexual ones I barely use) But the majority of moji I see is gladly still emoji. Edit:// however check Bitmoji to see how far we've gone with stickers already :)

xorcist 5y ago

Not sure if this shows my age, but emojis are problematic because the perceived intent change with age and context. One trivial example being the basic laughing smiley. For me who integrated them in my nervous system when all of them had noses, they convey a humorous undertone. So "you are kind ;)" would read as "you are kind -- nah, just kidding!". I must pause when reading them to re-program myself not to see them sarcastically because I know most people don't mean it that way. Almost every kind of happy emoji seems to be a universal way of showing good intentions. It wasn't any easier when they crept into professional communications but here we are. Just something to be aware of I guess.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
To be fair to emoji, all language changes with context. Just look at the differences between, say, UK English and US English. Is someone who's 'pissed' angry or drunk?

samuell 5y ago

Sirikon 5y ago

Imagine an article saying "I stopped using 'thanks' and 'sorry'". Same results. Emojis are part of the language now.

diogenesjunior 5y ago

reddit moment

kidsil 5y ago

I was fine with the common IRC emojis: :) :| :\ :( :O :D XD :P and an occasional @_@

DonHopkins 5y ago

>What we saw was, if you go too far in that [representational] direction because you want to be inclusive, people don’t see themselves represented and they’re not going to use it. You have to have enough specificity to represent you enough, but not so inclusive that your emoji palette is hundreds of thousands of emoji. Scott McCloud wrote a whole book about this: "Understanding Comics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics >One of the book's key concepts is that of "masking," a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration) >The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily. Scott McCloud and Will Wright discussed masking and other issues in their 2002 GDC discussion, "When Maps Collide": https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022567/When-Maps-Collide-A-Conversation https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022567/When-Maps-Collide-A-Co... Understanding Comics and masking influenced The Sims 1 graphics architecture and design (using detailed pre-rendered 2d+z sprites for the environment and simplistic real time 3d graphics for the people), which fortunately ran fast on the common un-accelerated 3d graphics hardware of the time (greatly expanding the user base), and synergistically enabled user created content (which was essential to its success) which I described in this earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676313 >Going 3D at that time in history meant that the quality of the graphic would take a huge hit, as well as the rendering speed, and fewer people would be able to run it because it would require a high end computer, so it was just not worth it. >Using 2D pre-rendered sprites means that the artists can use as many polygons, rich textures and lighting techniques as they want in 3D Studio Max, and tweak them until the sprites look perfect, and that's exactly what the user sees. You just could not approach anywhere near that quality with 3D graphics at the time. Of course things are a lot different now! >That was during the time that The Sims was also in development. One reason The Sims was successful is that it did not try to be full 3D, and ran well on low-end computers (the old computer that little sister inherits from big brother when he upgrades to a gaming machine). It used a hybrid 2D/3D system of z-buffered sprites, with an orthographic projection constrained to four rotations, three zooms, and only the characters were rendered with polygons into the pre-rendered z-buffered scene, using DirectX's software renderer. >I developed the character animation system and content creation tools for The Sims, and when the EA executives were reviewing the technology to decide if they should buy Maxis, to justify our approach I bought them a copy of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, which explained a concept called "masking" -- http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anime_links/mccloud.html http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anim... >Hergé's Tintin comics are a great example of how that works: The idea is that by making the background environment very realistic (i.e. rich pre-rendered sprites from high poly models), and the characters themselves more abstract (i.e. efficient real time 3d texture mapped low poly models), the readers (players) can more easily project themselves into the scene and identify with the characters. Much in the same way an abstract happy face can represent everyone, while a photograph of a person's face only represents that person. >The other fortunate consequence was that it was easy for players to create their own characters and objects by editing the textures and sprites with 2D tools like Photoshop, without requiring difficult 3D modeling tools like 3D Studio Max, so that enabled a lot of user created content by kids instead of professional artists, which was essential to the success of the game.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dolmen 5y ago

I Stopped Using Emojis When I Posted On HN.

throwawaycuriou 5y ago

The author's reflections after stopping using emoji: "In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile." This helped me make a connection to a larger phenomenon in changing speech, something which I struggle with. Emojis a way of communicating with loose precision. There are also analogous ways to do so while using words. And there are speakers in their daily speech which greatly lean into the saftey of loose precision to the point of subterfurge and agression. A 'like' softens all opinion. A 'you know' coerces the listener to agree. A 'whatever' implies others' priorities are misplaced. An 'uh' or 'um' is a don't interrupt me! Overreliance on ambiguous prounouns. 'Stuff' or 'Thing'. I find these mechanisms off putting. They sometimes correlate with paranoia, esteem issues, or sociopathy. So I try to avoid such speakers if possible, since I feel like an asshole to point it out. It's ok to wait until your thoughts are formed. It's ok to be incorrect. Pick your target and try to hit it. If you communicate with loose precision or emoji you inhibit building knowledge together.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. Actually, I think the ambiguity can be an advantage. One interesting thing I noticed in communicating in a foreign language is that sometimes, I'll feel like either of two meanings might be appropriate -- and the other language has a word that might have either sense. It always feels like a big win to use that word when that happens. On the other hand, I used to message someone frequently who would use really weird emoji like a pig face, and who steadfastly refused to ever explain what any of them meant. That got annoying.

whalesalad 5y ago

Now we all need to collectively stop using the Poppins typeface.

rthomas6 5y ago

So it's strange that I already don't use emojis? Sometimes I will write "haha" or ":)" in chats, and that's about it. That was all I needed when I was in my 20s, and I see no need to change that in my 30s. It probably helps that I don't have social media, except HN and occasionally Reddit. I didn't know this made me an outlier. Whenever someone uses a lot of emojis, I assume they are young, or wanting to seem young.

gaudat 5y ago

Stickers are the superior choice. Check out LINE where users can customize their stickers with their own captions. Or Telegram where users discover stickers from other users rather than a central store.

nkotov 5y ago

I’m 27, went through a later part of my teen years with an iPhone. I’m not big on emojis and neither are most of my friends. Every once in a while I might use it to add a “feeling” but most of the time, I just don’t use it.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

>When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? I don't remember ever using an emoji. Are emoji such an integral part of text communication that not using them is surprising?

npteljes 5y ago

I don't like Emojis too much, but I'm fascinated by Unicode, it representations, and how creatively people abuse it, to create faces for example. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

JohnFen 5y ago

I use two or three emojis, but my problem with them is that I can rarely be confident that I know what they mean when others use them.