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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

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.
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      Well, I find that most scions have moved to Twitter only to obsessively complain about that orange site. Tells a lot about tech twitter.
      - krapp 5y ago
        It tells a lot about the "orange website." Most people complaining about HN outside this forum are also members of this forum - almost no one else cares. The guidelines don't allow complaining about or criticizing the community here, and the mods tend to take any such criticisms personally, even if they agree with them. Certain cultural pathologies are left to fester in the name of maintaining civility and high "signal to noise," so people have to vent their frustrations with this place elsewhere. And let's be fair, HN complains obsessively about the rest of the web, and especially social media, all the time. It just can't get as good as it gives.
        Bayart 5y ago
        Is there such a guideline ? If there is, I've never noticed it. I've certainly seen people address HN on HN quite a few times, I might even have done it myself, but I was always under the impression that it was fine insofar as you're acting sensible. Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN.
        krapp 5y ago
        No specific guideline, it's more the effect of various guidelines being interpreted by a defensive culture. We can't accuse someone of not having read the article, despite two of the biggest problems this community has regarding the quality of conversation being people only commenting on the title, and people using the title as a springboard for whatever polemic it triggers in them. We can't be "snarky" or "sneer" about the community. Any direct criticism of the community comes off as snark. Meta commentary is frowned upon for being unsubstantive. All criticism of the community is meta commentary by definition. >Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN. And then again, the problem might be HN. Getting invested in a community and being disappointed in its faults isn't a problem.
  - TeMPOraL 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. It's not exactly that. HN has plenty of humor (and lord knows it's the easiest way to rack up karma, if you care about such things) - you just have to put some effort into it. "Show HN" attracts criticism mostly because the opposite of that would be just patting someone on their back, which is boring and benefits neither the submission author, nor the community. Good, constructive criticism gives everyone a chance to improve. Bad criticism tends to get down-voted and flagged pretty quickly. > And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it. Unicode does work. Just not all of it. If you think some characters currently filtered out should be available on HN, you can always ask 'dang to remove them from the filter (via mail, hn@ycombinator.com). I've done that in the past. That said, it's important to remember why many Unicode characters are blocked: it's because of spam. There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more. This goes directly against the kind of culture that makes HN the place it is.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > HN has plenty of humor (and lord knows it's the easiest way to rack up karma, if you care about such things) I think the easiest way to rack up karma is to search existing comment threads for links, and then submit those links.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      > There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more. Also as a means of trying to fool keyword-based anti-spam filters. I've seen entire words spelled out in alternate Unicode characters that look like the characters of the actual word, but are not the actual letters they look like visually. Computers, being inherently "dumb machines" totally overlook such words if they're not actively blocked at some level by the filter (easy way is to block the actual characters these spammers use, but of course this can then cause problems for those who actually use those characters properly; Yay, spammers. Ruining the Internet for everyone).
  - papito 5y ago
    HN is the kind of place where, in response to a joke, the squares will inundate you with links to research papers about how most people find themselves funny but in really they are not, without a hint of irony. I mean, what about all the research on how some people who chronically do not find anything funny? At first it got me thinking, but this is a place where horrible humans like Peter Thiel are worshipped, so yeah - it's not me.
- sambeau 5y ago
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- hedberg10 5y ago
  Behold, the superiority of the German language, having Emojis build in before they were invented: Ü
  - kuratkull 5y ago
    We have that in Estonia too, but we also have the extreme-surprise emoji Ö
    - Lex-2008 5y ago
      Some say that Cyrillic letter Ы is a single character for "lol".
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        That letter is interesting to me for being two separate pieces. Any idea how that happened?
        Lex-2008 5y ago
        Honestly, I don't know. But Wikipedia says it was a ligature of two letters ("Ь" and "I"), which later changed their values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yery#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yery#Origin
    - MrDresden 5y ago
      Icelandic has the 'Ö' and also the 'Þ' (goes very well with ':'). Not sure what the 'Æ' could stand in for though
      - __s 5y ago
        Æ looks like the blank face of shame. Somehow I'm picturing E being the mouth's shape in that expression
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      That one's also part of German. They have umlauts for A, O, and U. Though as far as I can tell, the German Ä is just a variant of "E". The other two are their own vowels, and they used to be rendered in English as "oe" and "ue". It's not clear to me why we decided that it was better to write "Gödel" as "Godel" than as "Goedel".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 5y ago
You don't need emojis for that. Just good ol' emoticons. I recognize what you mean about the office memos due to trivial misunderstandings (particularly tone misunderstandings) escalating. In my experience, almost all of them are the cases of someone erring on the side of seriousness. Myself, I mitigate that up front by judicious use of two emoticons: ":)" and ";)". The very act of using either of them, independent of the choice and context, already marks the whole sentence/paragraph/conversation as friendly. Adding trees and rocketships and popcorns? Especially to either replace the exact word, or put it next to that word? What's the point? (Ok, I'll admit I found two other emojis useful at work: thumbs-up and facepalm.)
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Or you could just use emoji like a normal person, and stop treating being stuck in the nineties as a virtue?
  - bartvk 5y ago
    You could be more friendly :)
- oblio 5y ago
  A rocketship emoji implies a launch, motion, starting something. Writing "rocketship" instead, besides being lame, also doesn't convey the same meaning and emotion.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yes, but I can't think of an example where a rocketship emoji would fit in a conversation (except for marketing language, which I consider to be hostile). Emojis directly corresponding to emotions make more sense: a facepalm emoji expresses the same thing that an actual gesture would.
    - Yiin 5y ago
      "I just got a job offer! "
DonHopkins 5y ago
@Begin(Flame) Old farts use Scribe markup and superfluous exclamation points instead of emojis!!!!!!!!! The most emotional arguments in the old days were about text editors that didn't support emojis, and characters you can't even see. VI and tabs suck. All hail Emacs and spaces!!!!!! @End(Flame) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)
wongarsu 5y ago
I agree that emojis (or emoticons or kaomojis) are incredibly helpful in text conversation. But I think there is another thing going on in the article, and that's using emojis to replace text, instead of enhancing it. Sending just a heart or a thumbs up instead of a "thank you :)" or "this made my day!". A practice that helps cutting the noise in busy social network posts, but is much less expressive and meaningful. An emoticon is like a smile: it's much more meaningful when combined with words.
- gverrilla 5y ago
  Meaningful is not the same as expressive.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    Both of these list "meaningful" as a synonym of "expressive": https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/expressive https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/expressive https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/expressive https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/expressive Of course, "meaningful" can be used in other ways; words often have more than one meaning. On the other hand, the commenter used "meaningful" and "expressive" in parallel, which suggests they already understood them to be distinct. So it's not clear what you're objecting to.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway316943 5y ago
The 7-38-55 rule is a useful way to think about communication even if it isn’t strictly accurate. My own feeling is that the percentages are more evenly divided between words, tone and body language. I think emoji go a long way towards making up for the failings of text only conversation but we’d be even better off if we could capture the tone as well.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> 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. It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message. Text or image, doesn't really matter, but it serves as a marker of "how I'm feeling about this message". Most common are some variety of :p and :/ . I think they serve a useful purpose, but I do get self-conscious about including them in every message. :/
- DavidPeiffer 5y ago
  >It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message. I know a couple who would always put a smiley face at the end of the message unless they were mad. It didn't make sense to me at the time, but I can see how it would work well. Years ago I saw a texting app which would take a selfie with every message and add it as a very small image next to the text. The intent was to attach some visible emotion to every message in a way that pure text can't accomplish.
ashleyn 5y ago
Some food for thought, the younger segment of the online neurodivergent community has come up with a solution to this problem: "tone indicators"[1]. They are semifrequently seen in the art spaces I hang out in. If you've seen "/s" on Reddit, you've probably seen a tone indicator. [1]: https://toneindicators.carrd.co/ https://toneindicators.carrd.co/
- userbinator 5y ago
  I've never heard of "tone indicators" before, but I've seen the usage of "/s" for a long time to indicate sarcasm, possibly as early as the 90s.
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    It was extremely frequently used on IRC back then Emojis as well, though they were pure ASCII, not the emoticons of today
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      the ASCII faces are the emoticons, emoji means "picture character" and includes all the UTF8 cartoons.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 411111111111111 5y ago
        both terms were coined after UTF-8 and after people started to replace the character strings like :) with pictures. emojis are technically the UTF-8 style emoticons, so you do have a point that i shouldn't call ascii style emoticons this, but its really a redundant distinction in my opinion. Especially as the term emoticon also applies to emojis/picture representations of ascii-style emoticons.
        5y ago
BongoMcCat 5y ago
How do you feel about regular smileys? I would argue that smileys are useful for the reasons you stated, but do you really need to use the emoji icons instead of building your own with regular characters such as :) ?
fullstop 5y ago
My mom, in her 60s, is worse since she often omits punctuation when replying. The conversation goes something like this: Me: "Watch the porch for packages, something is arriving today for your birthday!" Her: "Great" She's not unhappy, but the lack of punctuation makes it very hard to tell. If I didn't know her well, I'd be a bit put off.
- slumdev 5y ago
  I intentionally end a lot of sentences with an exclamation point because I have seen this problem and don't want to be perceived this way by colleagues. But in a short message, it can be half (or more) of the message! I probably end up coming off like a dog who's so excited he can't sit long enough to earn a treat!
golergka 5y ago
> I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. Are you talking about emojis or smilies too? Because emoticons were probably invented by Nabokov (one of the best russian writers of all time) around 1969 [0]: > I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. [0]: https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/books/vladimir-nabokov-invent-emoticon https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/books/vladimir-naboko...
cooperadymas 5y ago
I agree, emojis are more expressive than words and cut down on the confusion in text-based conversations ;)
Merem 5y ago
Hm, I don't know. From my experience, communication without emoji of any kind works perfectly fine in a workplace and so far, I don't think I've ever received work-related communication that contained it. After all, it's not exactly difficult to write in a rational and neutral way what you want to say. If people want to interpret some kind of not-explicitely-said something into a written text, that's pretty much on them then. If anything, I consider emoji to be rather unprofessional, same as excessive usage of punctuation marks. In the days when forums were still doing fine, anyone who wrote a sentence ending with "!!!!!" would usually get a response like: "Satzzeichen sind keine Rudeltiere!" or some more eloquent but mean one which I can't remember. Anyway, in the end, it might just be a cultural (German) thing but it seems to work since I've never seen an issue arise from the lack of emoji, smileys etc.
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
Hello Woofy has been working on an AI to find the right emoji to convert customers in online advertising. https://www.emojidata.ai/ https://www.emojidata.ai/
sigzero 5y ago
Emojis are in no way 'professional'.
stronglikedan 5y ago
My solution is to not write hasty "professional" emails. I take my time to craft my messages for conciseness, and re-read and re-write them before sending to remove any ambiguity. I do use emojis in text messages, and other non-professional communication. To me, professional communication requires a little more time and effort, but that's what makes it professional.
andrewzah 5y ago
One problem with emojis is the inconsistency of the faces across devices and services. Not to mention people have different interpretations. Tone indicators are much more clear in my opinion. Nevertheless I expect to see business / formal language to use more and more emoji in the coming years. It’ll happen slowly, but surely.

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.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    Well, I find that most scions have moved to Twitter only to obsessively complain about that orange site. Tells a lot about tech twitter.
    - krapp 5y ago
      It tells a lot about the "orange website." Most people complaining about HN outside this forum are also members of this forum - almost no one else cares. The guidelines don't allow complaining about or criticizing the community here, and the mods tend to take any such criticisms personally, even if they agree with them. Certain cultural pathologies are left to fester in the name of maintaining civility and high "signal to noise," so people have to vent their frustrations with this place elsewhere. And let's be fair, HN complains obsessively about the rest of the web, and especially social media, all the time. It just can't get as good as it gives.
      - Bayart 5y ago
        Is there such a guideline ? If there is, I've never noticed it. I've certainly seen people address HN on HN quite a few times, I might even have done it myself, but I was always under the impression that it was fine insofar as you're acting sensible. Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN.
        krapp 5y ago
        No specific guideline, it's more the effect of various guidelines being interpreted by a defensive culture. We can't accuse someone of not having read the article, despite two of the biggest problems this community has regarding the quality of conversation being people only commenting on the title, and people using the title as a springboard for whatever polemic it triggers in them. We can't be "snarky" or "sneer" about the community. Any direct criticism of the community comes off as snark. Meta commentary is frowned upon for being unsubstantive. All criticism of the community is meta commentary by definition. >Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN. And then again, the problem might be HN. Getting invested in a community and being disappointed in its faults isn't a problem.
- TeMPOraL 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. It's not exactly that. HN has plenty of humor (and lord knows it's the easiest way to rack up karma, if you care about such things) - you just have to put some effort into it. "Show HN" attracts criticism mostly because the opposite of that would be just patting someone on their back, which is boring and benefits neither the submission author, nor the community. Good, constructive criticism gives everyone a chance to improve. Bad criticism tends to get down-voted and flagged pretty quickly. > And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it. Unicode does work. Just not all of it. If you think some characters currently filtered out should be available on HN, you can always ask 'dang to remove them from the filter (via mail, hn@ycombinator.com). I've done that in the past. That said, it's important to remember why many Unicode characters are blocked: it's because of spam. There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more. This goes directly against the kind of culture that makes HN the place it is.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > HN has plenty of humor (and lord knows it's the easiest way to rack up karma, if you care about such things) I think the easiest way to rack up karma is to search existing comment threads for links, and then submit those links.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more. Also as a means of trying to fool keyword-based anti-spam filters. I've seen entire words spelled out in alternate Unicode characters that look like the characters of the actual word, but are not the actual letters they look like visually. Computers, being inherently "dumb machines" totally overlook such words if they're not actively blocked at some level by the filter (easy way is to block the actual characters these spammers use, but of course this can then cause problems for those who actually use those characters properly; Yay, spammers. Ruining the Internet for everyone).
- papito 5y ago
  HN is the kind of place where, in response to a joke, the squares will inundate you with links to research papers about how most people find themselves funny but in really they are not, without a hint of irony. I mean, what about all the research on how some people who chronically do not find anything funny? At first it got me thinking, but this is a place where horrible humans like Peter Thiel are worshipped, so yeah - it's not me.
sambeau 5y ago
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
hedberg10 5y ago
Behold, the superiority of the German language, having Emojis build in before they were invented: Ü
- kuratkull 5y ago
  We have that in Estonia too, but we also have the extreme-surprise emoji Ö
  - Lex-2008 5y ago
    Some say that Cyrillic letter Ы is a single character for "lol".
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      That letter is interesting to me for being two separate pieces. Any idea how that happened?
      - Lex-2008 5y ago
        Honestly, I don't know. But Wikipedia says it was a ligature of two letters ("Ь" and "I"), which later changed their values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yery#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yery#Origin
  - MrDresden 5y ago
    Icelandic has the 'Ö' and also the 'Þ' (goes very well with ':'). Not sure what the 'Æ' could stand in for though
    - __s 5y ago
      Æ looks like the blank face of shame. Somehow I'm picturing E being the mouth's shape in that expression
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    That one's also part of German. They have umlauts for A, O, and U. Though as far as I can tell, the German Ä is just a variant of "E". The other two are their own vowels, and they used to be rendered in English as "oe" and "ue". It's not clear to me why we decided that it was better to write "Gödel" as "Godel" than as "Goedel".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 5y ago

You don't need emojis for that. Just good ol' emoticons. I recognize what you mean about the office memos due to trivial misunderstandings (particularly tone misunderstandings) escalating. In my experience, almost all of them are the cases of someone erring on the side of seriousness. Myself, I mitigate that up front by judicious use of two emoticons: ":)" and ";)". The very act of using either of them, independent of the choice and context, already marks the whole sentence/paragraph/conversation as friendly. Adding trees and rocketships and popcorns? Especially to either replace the exact word, or put it next to that word? What's the point? (Ok, I'll admit I found two other emojis useful at work: thumbs-up and facepalm.)

user-the-name 5y ago
Or you could just use emoji like a normal person, and stop treating being stuck in the nineties as a virtue?
- bartvk 5y ago
  You could be more friendly :)
oblio 5y ago
A rocketship emoji implies a launch, motion, starting something. Writing "rocketship" instead, besides being lame, also doesn't convey the same meaning and emotion.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yes, but I can't think of an example where a rocketship emoji would fit in a conversation (except for marketing language, which I consider to be hostile). Emojis directly corresponding to emotions make more sense: a facepalm emoji expresses the same thing that an actual gesture would.
  - Yiin 5y ago
    "I just got a job offer! "

DonHopkins 5y ago

@Begin(Flame) Old farts use Scribe markup and superfluous exclamation points instead of emojis!!!!!!!!! The most emotional arguments in the old days were about text editors that didn't support emojis, and characters you can't even see. VI and tabs suck. All hail Emacs and spaces!!!!!! @End(Flame) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)

wongarsu 5y ago

I agree that emojis (or emoticons or kaomojis) are incredibly helpful in text conversation. But I think there is another thing going on in the article, and that's using emojis to replace text, instead of enhancing it. Sending just a heart or a thumbs up instead of a "thank you :)" or "this made my day!". A practice that helps cutting the noise in busy social network posts, but is much less expressive and meaningful. An emoticon is like a smile: it's much more meaningful when combined with words.

gverrilla 5y ago
Meaningful is not the same as expressive.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Both of these list "meaningful" as a synonym of "expressive": https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/expressive https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/expressive https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/expressive https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/expressive Of course, "meaningful" can be used in other ways; words often have more than one meaning. On the other hand, the commenter used "meaningful" and "expressive" in parallel, which suggests they already understood them to be distinct. So it's not clear what you're objecting to.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwaway316943 5y ago

The 7-38-55 rule is a useful way to think about communication even if it isn’t strictly accurate. My own feeling is that the percentages are more evenly divided between words, tone and body language. I think emoji go a long way towards making up for the failings of text only conversation but we’d be even better off if we could capture the tone as well.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> 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. It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message. Text or image, doesn't really matter, but it serves as a marker of "how I'm feeling about this message". Most common are some variety of :p and :/ . I think they serve a useful purpose, but I do get self-conscious about including them in every message. :/

DavidPeiffer 5y ago
>It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message. I know a couple who would always put a smiley face at the end of the message unless they were mad. It didn't make sense to me at the time, but I can see how it would work well. Years ago I saw a texting app which would take a selfie with every message and add it as a very small image next to the text. The intent was to attach some visible emotion to every message in a way that pure text can't accomplish.

ashleyn 5y ago

Some food for thought, the younger segment of the online neurodivergent community has come up with a solution to this problem: "tone indicators"[1]. They are semifrequently seen in the art spaces I hang out in. If you've seen "/s" on Reddit, you've probably seen a tone indicator. [1]: https://toneindicators.carrd.co/ https://toneindicators.carrd.co/

userbinator 5y ago
I've never heard of "tone indicators" before, but I've seen the usage of "/s" for a long time to indicate sarcasm, possibly as early as the 90s.
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  It was extremely frequently used on IRC back then Emojis as well, though they were pure ASCII, not the emoticons of today
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    the ASCII faces are the emoticons, emoji means "picture character" and includes all the UTF8 cartoons.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 411111111111111 5y ago
      both terms were coined after UTF-8 and after people started to replace the character strings like :) with pictures. emojis are technically the UTF-8 style emoticons, so you do have a point that i shouldn't call ascii style emoticons this, but its really a redundant distinction in my opinion. Especially as the term emoticon also applies to emojis/picture representations of ascii-style emoticons.
      - 5y ago

BongoMcCat 5y ago

How do you feel about regular smileys? I would argue that smileys are useful for the reasons you stated, but do you really need to use the emoji icons instead of building your own with regular characters such as :) ?

fullstop 5y ago

My mom, in her 60s, is worse since she often omits punctuation when replying. The conversation goes something like this: Me: "Watch the porch for packages, something is arriving today for your birthday!" Her: "Great" She's not unhappy, but the lack of punctuation makes it very hard to tell. If I didn't know her well, I'd be a bit put off.

slumdev 5y ago
I intentionally end a lot of sentences with an exclamation point because I have seen this problem and don't want to be perceived this way by colleagues. But in a short message, it can be half (or more) of the message! I probably end up coming off like a dog who's so excited he can't sit long enough to earn a treat!

golergka 5y ago

> I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. Are you talking about emojis or smilies too? Because emoticons were probably invented by Nabokov (one of the best russian writers of all time) around 1969 [0]: > I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. [0]: https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/books/vladimir-nabokov-invent-emoticon https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/books/vladimir-naboko...

cooperadymas 5y ago

I agree, emojis are more expressive than words and cut down on the confusion in text-based conversations ;)

Merem 5y ago

Hm, I don't know. From my experience, communication without emoji of any kind works perfectly fine in a workplace and so far, I don't think I've ever received work-related communication that contained it. After all, it's not exactly difficult to write in a rational and neutral way what you want to say. If people want to interpret some kind of not-explicitely-said something into a written text, that's pretty much on them then. If anything, I consider emoji to be rather unprofessional, same as excessive usage of punctuation marks. In the days when forums were still doing fine, anyone who wrote a sentence ending with "!!!!!" would usually get a response like: "Satzzeichen sind keine Rudeltiere!" or some more eloquent but mean one which I can't remember. Anyway, in the end, it might just be a cultural (German) thing but it seems to work since I've never seen an issue arise from the lack of emoji, smileys etc.

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

Hello Woofy has been working on an AI to find the right emoji to convert customers in online advertising. https://www.emojidata.ai/ https://www.emojidata.ai/

sigzero 5y ago

Emojis are in no way 'professional'.

stronglikedan 5y ago

My solution is to not write hasty "professional" emails. I take my time to craft my messages for conciseness, and re-read and re-write them before sending to remove any ambiguity. I do use emojis in text messages, and other non-professional communication. To me, professional communication requires a little more time and effort, but that's what makes it professional.

andrewzah 5y ago

One problem with emojis is the inconsistency of the faces across devices and services. Not to mention people have different interpretations. Tone indicators are much more clear in my opinion. Nevertheless I expect to see business / formal language to use more and more emoji in the coming years. It’ll happen slowly, but surely.