12 ms·

Your brain on emoji

104 points by dnetesn 3y ago

aaroninsf 3y ago
Idle comment, I perpetually react poorly to the wink icon, at least, as it appears on Apple devices. I get the sense people intend it to mean "droll wink" which is inclusive and often characteristic of good humored positive "play." For me the icon parses as a more confrontational eyebrow raise, sardonic shading into sarcastic, with a whiff of the scornful, contemptuous, or hostile. It's not a big deal, but it's been years and I still have to hand-hold myself past the intuitive reaction by reminding myself that's almost never how it was meant. I wish you could swap out the glyphs.
WaffleIronMaker 3y ago
I'm surprised to see the spread of emoji attributed to Microsoft in the initial sentences. It's possible that the author may be referring to the smiley faces in extended character pages, or maybe Webdings, but I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically, which I believe to have been petitioned by Google and popularized by Apple. Interesting article either way.
- baz00 3y ago
  I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK. Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.
    - FFP999 3y ago
      [dead]
    - nine_k 3y ago
      Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts. See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan. Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively. MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.
        NikkiA 3y ago
        I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996
      - numpad0 3y ago
        Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.
      - xdennis 3y ago
        You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based. Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - willio58 3y ago
    Yeah the original way to get emojis on iPhone was to go in and enable a keyboard hidden among the Japanese category of languages in settings. While apps existed that just basically gave directions for how to enable that.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  MSN messenger had a ton of emojis and at the time (around 2000), in my experience, they were used on messenger a lot more than on AIM or ICQ. This is, of course, in the west. As far as Unicode, the impetus for inclusion, while petitioned by Google, was at least officially due to enabling compatibility with Japanese phones where emoji were also quite popular.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    Those were emoticons, they developed separately from the Japanese emoji that we use today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      They were a fixed set of pictures that you could put inline with the text in a message; despite the differing origin, I don't see the distinction.
      - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        The distinction is twofold: 1) The term ‘emoji’ came along with the Japanese emoji on the iPhone. Nobody at the time called MSN/forum emoticons ‘emoji’, so it’s a neologism to say that MSN had emoji. 2) Emoji are a fixed, standardized set that works the same way across the entire OS. 2000s emoticons were implemented separately on each app and website, with differing support and designs everywhere. Some contemporary apps (like Slack and Discord) choose to override the system emoji style and provide their own shortcodes though, so I guess they are like a hybrid of emoji and traditional emoticons.
- Nition 3y ago
  That first paragraph really put me off the article to be honest. Why read an article on emoji by someone who doesn't know what emoji are? At the same time, I do realise "emoji" is now often being used as a generic term that encompasses both true emoji (unicode-based) and general emoticon images.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - xzsinu 3y ago
    I've never heard emoticons referred to as emoji, mainly because people don't use emoticons anymore (unless they still post on forums). It seems like a deliberate editorial decision. I would prefer to preserve the distinction, however, for reasons GP stated.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I use emoticons when texting (because I'm a graybeard), but my phone translates them into emojis before sending. So I've just taken to calling them all emojis.
      - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        My beard might be even greyer because I still think of them as 'smileys' :)
        JohnFen 3y ago
        It took me years to change the habit of calling them smileys!
      - ClassyJacket 3y ago
        Do you mean you use smileys like :) :( :P ? Emotions were the little images you could place amongst text in MSN Messenger.
- omoikane 3y ago
  e-moji should be attributed to NTT DoCoMo, who first had it on their feature phones in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji The article above also noted how MSN Messenger and BlackBerry adopted emoji from 2003 onwards.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    MSN Messenger never adopted emoji, they had their own emoticons/smilies that were developed independently. There were no emoji in the west until the iPhone got it in 2011
- veave 3y ago
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...
- markussss 3y ago
  I felt that it was on point to point out Microsoft, as it was the main area where I first started using emojis (before they were emojis, even though it was functionally the same). MSN Messenger came with a nice set of default smileys, and it was very simple to create your own smileys and use them in conversations with others. When other people sent a smiley to you, you could just right click it and add it to your own private repertoire of smileys.
- deathanatos 3y ago
  Because it's wrong. Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji") Even "emoticons"¹, or pictographs replacing some text like ":-)" (which is how they were called before the west imported "emoji", largely because it showed up in phone IMEs after its inclusion in Unicode) were definitely a thing in the late 90s. I suspect AIM must have had them before Messenger, but frankly, I didn't think anyone actually used Messenger except maybe business types? Everyone I seemed to know was on AIM, with a few odd exceptions on Yahoo, if they were normal. If they were more nerdy, IRC, but that was text based. (Though some clients would still translate certain text sequences into pictures. I'm pretty sure, e.g., Trillian could/would, but I don't remember when I adopted it. But it could have been earlier than 2003.) ¹The picture version. As I recall the usage of this word in the late 90s/early '00s, it could mean either ":-)" as text, or the pictogram version thereof, largely because clients at the time would just convert between the two freely. One end might send text, but the receiving client would pictogram it.
  - eonwe 3y ago
    On chat applications: In Finland no one used AIM and everyone used messenger. I suspect this was the norm also elsewhere in Europe. I am talking about Messenger 4.6 that came built in with windows xp and its later versions, not the business version.
    - Ennea 3y ago
      The most popular choice in Germany used to be ICQ, at least based on my own friend group and various conversations I've had over the years.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      In the Netherlands, MSN Messenger (commonly abbreviated just 'MSN') was essentially a monopoly, although at that time it was only used by young people (older people still just called each other on the phone). With the rise of smartphones though, it ended up being supplanted by WhatsApp, with the ill-conceived migration to Skype killing off most of the last stragglers.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically Platforms like Slack and Mastodon now let you add what they call "custom emoji" which back in a web forum in 1999 we would have called "smilies", but in any case are definitely not part of unicode. The term has evolved to just mean any graphical smilies/small embedded images
baal80spam 3y ago
It boggles my mind that emoji can be used in an URL.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Yeah, I have some emoji domains, though the support is weird. Safari actually supports them best. I keep finding weird places that support emojis, like usernames on some web sites. And someone on HN showed me recently that you can make emoji filenames in Windows at least.
- nlunbeck 3y ago
  Yeah that was pretty cool, although I guess you run the risk of some browsers presenting it unrendered. If I had a majority of mobile users for a site, I probably wouldn't think twice before using an emoji in my url -- definitely makes it memorable
frereubu 3y ago
I was a hold-out for quite a while, like the author, because they felt very twee. The one that convinced me though was the thumbs-up emoji, which can be an entire reply to an email or text, that says "I've read this, and we don't need to continue the conversation", with undertones of agreement or a thank-you. Somehow single-word replies like "Gotcha" or "Yes" felt too curt, and anything longer invited further discussion where I didn't want any. I don't really use any other emojis though - I love using language too much, and all of the others feel like I can express myself better through words.
- dijit 3y ago
  Yet (and I'm sorry to generalise); Gen-Z "typically finds thumbs up emoji passive aggressive" https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-emojis-beyond-rude-thumbs-up/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-...
  - e40 3y ago
    First, NY Post? F them and the horse they rode in on. They stoke culture wars at every turn. Second, even if it was true (which I doubt), there are some things which should be ignored and someone believing this nonsense should not be coddled. I'm very liberal, but this is just pure nonsense.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      Idk that's how I interpret the thumbs up after I say something. In my mind it's comes off like a dismissive "that's cool". Like what ever I said isn't worthy of a text response. Idk it's a little odd to explain I guess
      - jameshart 3y ago
        I think it means something very different in a work slack thread than a text chat with friends. In a work context, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want to briefly communicate ‘go ahead you have my approval’ and not mean anything snarky by it. Yet if I’m messaging with my friends and they ask about going for drinks Saturday, and I say ‘go ahead, you have my approval’, that’s going to come off as pretty passive aggressive too.
helloworld 3y ago
This link in the article about the history of the :-) emoticon -- proposed by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon on September 19, 1982 -- is really fascinating: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
orzi 3y ago
Oh my, Internet, what have you done with smileys ;( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
ttoinou 3y ago
Did you know ? Eastern europeans end words (without space) with singles characters "(" and ")" to indicate full smileys. Only themselves understand each others and they dont tell anyone about it)))
- agubelu 3y ago
  Why eastern europeans in particular? Is it somehow related to slavic languages? Now I'm curious
  - Tenoke 3y ago
    I'm guessing they are overgeneralizing since I'm a Bulgarian and I haven't really seen anyone do that.
    - computerfriend 3y ago
      I also thought it was an Eastern European thing. Would be nice to see a map of prevalence of this trend.
    - ttoinou 3y ago
      Yeah sorry I meant far-eastern europeans
  - sznio 3y ago
    It's the Russian keyboard layout that makes ":" difficult to type. In Poland we just use the US keyboard layout so that's not a problem. I assume it's similar for other non-cyrillic slavic languages.
    - ttoinou 3y ago
      Weird, I've seen poles do that
- akarlsten 3y ago
  From my old WoW-playing days, I was given to understand that : was awkward to reach on cyrillic keyboards, so many of the russians skipped it and just used ) or even %) sometimes (which sort of looks like eyes and a nose if you squint)
sickcodebruh 3y ago
I was also a holdout until I saw emojis described as "body language for text". That helps contextualize them and let me appreciate them. They let you add so much nuance and personality to text. In a world of async communication, they can be crucial signifiers of intent.
- noman-land 3y ago
  I was just about to write this. Emoji not only takes the place of body language and facial expressions over a textual medium, but gifs and other pictograms are a whole linguistic and almost hieroglyphic medium of shared cultural communication.
- raincole 3y ago
  Unless you're specifically trained for that, it's very hard to fake body language and facial expression. That's the whole point to it. And it doesn't apply to emoji.
labster 3y ago
I’m starting to think that Hacker News is on the wrong side of history on this one. Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. Emoji are becoming a permanent part of written language. I don’t want to see a post full of emoji either, but perhaps a filter that allows one emoji per 20 words would work. Perhaps using a font with black line or grayscale emoji?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- computerfriend 3y ago
  I don't hate emoji (any more -- the article also describes my own experiences warming up to them). I'd hate to see them on HN though. :(
- sznio 3y ago
  > Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. For me at least, seeing emoji makes me even more uncertain about the meaning of the message.
- cglong 3y ago
  This is why I love Google's Noto Emoji font: https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/what-is-black-and-white-and-read-all.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/what-is-black-and-...
- layer8 3y ago
  You can use emoticons or kaomoji perfectly fine if you want. ^_– ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tgv 3y ago
  It's not an emotional channel, at least not purely. And you can express that very well in text, too. You just need to cut the irony and sarcasm. For the (rather dumb and contrived) examples from the article * Unfortunately, her cake she was terrible. * Her cake was such a failure, I had to laugh. * She made a nice cake.
JohnMakin 3y ago
Emojis in written text can lose their meaning in translation. Your intended meaning may not be what your audience understands, but I guess that’s inherent in most communication. I had a bunch of russian coworkers once, and one of them would constantly type “)))” any time I asked him a question. I thought it was some weird cyrillic keyboard quirk and never paid it any mind, until I learned it’s the approximate russian equivalent for “lol.” Didn’t know what to make of him after that. I guess he thought I was a moron.
- veave 3y ago
  Russians do that. The first time I noticed it was in Counter-Strike. They would type ))) and the messages would look like this: Vladimir : ))) So I thought that they "reused" the colon that separated the name from the message. That was my theory at least...
- hammock 3y ago
  ))) is just a beaming smile... derived from :) but without the eyes. Not exclusively Russian Separately, I remember years ago doing social media competitive audits and someone saw >>>>>> in there and thought it was errant text. E.g. "Taco Bell >>>>>>>". Of course what it means is Taco Bell is better than everything
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    Git conflict emoji.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I would interpret it as "leaving for Taco Bell"
  - codq 3y ago
    Kinda adds a whole new layer to the drone metal band sunnO)))
- skocznymroczny 3y ago
  Yeah, )) is fairly common in Russia and neighboring countries such as Belarus or Armenia. Another one I encountered at work was a Taiwanese coworker ending sentences with a ~ character which apparently indicates "cute" / "playful"
lapcat 3y ago
I quit using emoji entirely almost 5 years ago, though I do continue to use a few simple emoticons. https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1047223298113896450 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/104722329811389645... My reasons: "There's a method to my madness. You see, gifs are trivially infinitely extensible and backward compatible. Whereas each new emoji requires an addition to Unicode and software updates. And the demand for more emoji is insatiable. That system is not practical or scalable." (I mentioned gifs there because I was known to frequently post gifs.) https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1052769660846952448 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/105276966084695244...
- noman-land 3y ago
  I think the big difference between gif and emoji is that you need to see a gif to know what it represents.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    You mean in terms of accessibility? The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text. Apparently emoji aren't the greatest for accessibility: https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/ https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/ It may be even worse for emoticons, so that's a legitimate criticism: https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-properly-66b73986b803 https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-...
    - fikama 3y ago
      What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs. To understand a meaning of a word/emoji/gif you have to see it in context several times or look up a definition. (with emojis and gifs there is additional problem in lack of dictionaries for them). When amount of words in a language is finite or they are extending slowly (emoji) I ma able to keep up with thier meanings as opposed to gifs and memes. Which are evolving to quickly for me to keep up.
hbn 3y ago
I think the biggest issue with (modern, unicode) emoji has been the different art used between OS/platform. It seems like everyone is kind of converging on making their emojis convey the same emotion as Apple's (which is probably the right move since Apple popularized them, and they're baked into a ton of images that have been circulating for years) Samsung had some rough emojis for a while. Look at their old "grimacing" face. Or the old cookies emoji that they made saltine crackers. Or their eye roll emoji which was a sarcastic eye roll on Apple, but Samsung had it as a cute smile. I'm sure that caused many a communication issue.
throwmeout123 3y ago
They make sense as reactions but are absolutely awful in prose. Emoji spam (specially rocket) is the litmus test for “people i dont want to work with”
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  One-character reactions are the only acceptable use of emoji. (I also judge anyone who stresses the second syllable of 'emoji', which is basically everyone.)
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Similarly, any email with an emoji in the subject line is an email I'm not going to read EDIT - guilty party in my inbox today is Newegg, twice. I should unsubscribe from those.
beauHD 3y ago
I don't know where I read it, but apparently older people use emojis to feel 'with it' and cool, whereas the younger crowd barely use them. (I could be wrong, and I have no source, so don't quote me on this). Also emojis are yet another data point to do things like sentiment analysis, and have been weaponized by social media companies to target more relevant ADs at you. Tweeted/X'd the beer emoji? Get ready for Heineken ADs.
- paganel 3y ago
  > whereas the younger crowd barely use them. ( As far as I can tell the emojis thing is (has been) mostly a millenials thing, the zoomers are mostly on the side of AAVE-speak and such related jargon (the famous fr fr, for example, even actively avoiding capitalisation is now seen as a thing). So, yeah, I'd say that the emojis have passed the peak of cool relevancy, hence why they're discussed on this quite boring forum by definitely not cool men in their late 20s and 30s (I'm a definitely not cool man in my early 40s myself).
overgard 3y ago
It's funny the way language is evolving; even things like how you use punctuation and capitalization now has meaning. Like 20 years ago, if I was sending an IM or something, I would always just write like I'm writing here. But now, if I'm sending someone a text or slack or something, I always feel like it's more casual/less try hard if it's lowercase with relaxed punctuation. (That's just my style, I don't expect others to match). If I end a text with a period and everything properly capitalized, I almost feel like I'm being too formal. (Admittedly, some people probably just think I'm sloppy and lazy!) I never got into writing "u" or "ur" though. For some reason those still bug me. I know a lot of people don't like memes or gifs, but actually, I think they're great. Sometimes it's much more effective to express a sentiment with an image instead of a word or phrase. I always feel a little cringe when I end a sentence in lol, like I'm laughing at my own joke, although sometimes it helps to soften something I'm saying.
- graypegg 3y ago
  ASL has some casual register signs that are simplified or single hand versions of complex signs [1] that only came about from people chatting more casually. The original version goes from being the only word, to being the formal word for that idea. I think humans just tend towards registers of communication, regardless of the medium. [1] https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson27.htm https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson27.htm
jodrellblank 3y ago
I'm starting to find them emotionally manipulative in a bad way. FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser. Especially when I'm using BrowserTamer[1] to intercept all URL launches so I can feed a few work URLs to Edge and Chrome, and FireFox as the default for everything else, so it effectively is my default browser. It's not the only piece of software behaving somewhat like that, either. [1] https://www.aloneguid.uk/projects/bt https://www.aloneguid.uk/projects/bt
- hammock 3y ago
  >FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser. The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you. Also - what about iPhones stubbornly showing green texts from Android messagers? That's not even "I'm sad you're using Android." It's more a passive-aggressive "I'm going to degrade your experience because your friend uses Android." Forget about emojis- Apple is weaponizing colors!
  - overgard 3y ago
    To be fair, the blue/green thing is kinda useful, I don't use a ton of apple-ecosystem exclusive things but it's nice to tell when I can or not.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    What's emotionally manipulative about "should"? ... what's degrading about green?
    - exac 3y ago
      Look at the re-sale market for used iPhones. Youth do not want to be caught dead with Android phones.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
diego_sandoval 3y ago
While useful, I think that emojis should not have been included in Unicode. Unicode is supposed to be a universal standard, but the inclusion and exclusion of some emojis is an ideological issue. The inclusion and wide usage of emojis gives the Unicode consortium a disproportionate degree of influence over the way we communicate.
uxamanda 3y ago
This podcast had an interesting deep dive on the history of on emoji recently - https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology She went into the unicode side of things as well.
new_user_final 3y ago
♥
- Kiro 3y ago
  How is this possible? I thought HN stripped emojis.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    It's the “black heart suit”.
    - bloak 3y ago
      Yes, it's U+2665, which is considered to be an emoji according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode, though U+2661 ("white heart suit", ♡) isn't. Probably HN treats ♥ and ♡ the same way, as ordinary characters, though.
d--b 3y ago
Emojis are used mostly in 2 ways: punctuating a sentence so that it’s tone is less ambiguous. A shortcut for an emotional state that is not dissimilar to writing “haha” “ew” or “meh”. As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons and can’t possibly imagine a world where emojis didn't exist. But I m surprised no one mentions the “!” or other stylistic tools like all caps. These are “contextual modifiers” for text that have existed for ages. Some languages do have sarcasm punctuation and possibly small adverbs that annotate some kind of emotional state. So basically yes, the article is right, emojis work mostly like words, but for me it’s just a continuation of what existed before (punctuation and onomatopoeia), and its extension and spread was made possible by the technology (an imposed vocabulary and convenient keyboard).
- m0llusk 3y ago
  commonly also used as tags on forum posts
- herodoturtle 3y ago
  > As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons Username checks out! (And I completely agree with your last point ^_^)
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  An article on this topic I like: Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation >"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on." >"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh and passive-aggressive," said Juan Abenante Rincon, 24, a social media manager for Adidas. "Like, are you mad? What's going on? Like, did I do something wrong?" https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your-kid-make-sure-to-double-check-your-punctuation https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...
  - brightlancer 3y ago
pingou 3y ago
Does anymore understand "the cake she made was terrible ;)" as ironic? To me the 3 sentences have all the same meaning, the emoji would just represent the way the person feels about it now. And perhaps with the ;), it could mean that they talked about how the person is a terrible cook before.
taylorius 3y ago
I don't like the overly cute emoticon "fonts" that some messengers use. Away into the night with those super smug looking apple cheeked smilies.
ryandv 3y ago
I find it disturbing that we consider emoji sufficiently expressive to stand in for the depth of meaning that a well-crafted passage can convey. In particular, I have lamented the paucity of information that modern short form social media - 280 character Tweets; 10 second shorts; soundbytes, quips, and shitposts on Reddit - is able to carry. There simply is not enough information within the medium to sufficiently disambiguate the multiple senses and interpretations one can read into the message, and I believe it is this lack of being able to even agree on what is being said that leads to so much miscommunication and conflict today. After all, any reading or interpretation of a message requires some form of _projection_ on the audience's part onto the canvas of the medium. Frege once wrote, "Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea." [0] Perhaps it is for this reason that Victorian-era writers (John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" comes to mind) employed such a flowery and verbose brand of English; it is only by sketching out their ideas in high enough resolution that one can have some hope in hell of conveying an idea to their reader, intact and bearing at least some resemblance to whatever it is they had in mind. To steal an idea from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 4.026: "The meanings of the simple signs (the words) must be explained to us, if we are to understand them." If one does not take the time to expand upon the definitions or the subtleties of the words, signs, or emoji they use, it is no surprise that some misunderstanding may arise. Why then, do we suppose that emoji will indeed communicate, unambiguously, the shades and nuances of meaning that we intend, simply because they bear some resemblance to a real-world object or common symbol? Did you contextualize its usage adequately? Is that picture indeed "worth a thousand words?" Which thousand did you choose when you last punched in that heart emoji? Emoji have progressed to a fourth-order simulacrum, in Baudrillard's terminology: "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever." Where perhaps emoji once may have been able to refer to the depth of meaning, the underlying reality to which they point, I find they are now carelessly thrown around, often, as another commenter has mentioned below, towards manipulative ends. Even the simple heart emoji is not something I've even used with my father over iMessage until very recently. Love is after all, a very powerful concept, and yet here we are, throwing it around willy-nilly, left and right, to people we haven't even met in person - or worse, _next to the links to purchase reddit premium or reddit gold._ Far from being an actual message of _agape_ or even _philia,_ which may have been a function of a first-order simulacrum, where the map accurately reflected the territory, it has become a hollow icon, meant to evoke some sentiment or feeling in the reader by its presentation alone, and not by virtue of its connection to some actual underlying sense of love. Baudrillard also writes: "All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?" I am not a Christian, or perhaps even a religious man, but the example is quite poignant. Can you draw me an emoji, an icon, of what was once taken to be the highest and most ineffable concept? And if emoji can fall short of communicating one ideal, why not others? Yet here we are, exchanging hollow signs in a lifeless, meaningless formal system of cold syntax, bereft of semantics. [0] http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf
teknopaul 3y ago
How can American authors write text that says Microsoft introduced... then a word like "Emoji" that is so obviously Japanese Authors still see the world through a lens, that until its big in US, it does not really exist, and then associate it to the US company that copied it first.
- avery17 3y ago
  Emoji means pictograph in japanese. I think it's fair to say that Americans "coined" the term as a name word for the characters where as the japanese were simply describing the characters literally.
- skhr0680 3y ago
  I'm guessing the author is refereing to emoticons from MSN Messenger. I don't think the term "emoji" gained popularity in the west until the iPhone came out, and made emoji wildly popular because of the one secret trick you had to do to enable the keyboard on non-Japanese phones.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Also emojis are a derivative of emoticons (or smileys, as they were called if you went far enough back): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
eimrine 3y ago
What is the difference between "the cake she made was terrible :-)" and "the cake she made was terrible :-("?
- lazyweb 3y ago
  "I still ate some and feel fine" vs. "I've been sitting on the toilet for the last 25 minutes".
- vsnf 3y ago
  The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies read to me like malicious intent vs agreeable disappointment. I.e., "The cake that horrible coworker of mine made was terrible, and everyone hated it. I delight in this schadenfreude." vs "The cake my loving and adorable girlfriend made me for my birthday was terrible, and while I appreciate the effort, it was hard to stomach. "
  - eimrine 3y ago
    > The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies (...) Russian smiles are even more advanced. They use only one sign ")" and "(". Of course you can multiply them.
codethief 3y ago
I still don't understand why emojis had to be added to Unicode. Sure, it helped with adoption but now we've got descriptive glyphs ("beaming face with smiling eyes") but every font displays them slightly or sometimes even very differently. In some cases, depending on what phone/font my conversation partner uses, we might interpret emojis completely differently and we won't even know!
sethammons 3y ago
> It turns out that a world freshly speckled with [emoji smile] is not really such a changed world after all. I've recently discovered there is a generational gap in smiley usage :) If you are younger, my ":)" above can be taken more as a condescending smirk that puts down the reader. If you are older, it is just a smile and signifies that I'm, well, what a smile usually means: I'm being friendly, happy, non-threatening. I apparently now have to watch how I use smileys because younger people have started interpreting the symbol, imho, incorrectly :( (I am unaware if a similar proviso extends to the sad face above)
- fouc 3y ago
  Actually even on IRC in the 90's, sometimes :) was sarcastic, really depended on context anyways. 5% chance of sarcasm. Internet is a highly sarcastic world so it's not a surprise that people eventually perceive it to be more sarcastic than it should be I suppose. You can just add a - to make it unambiguous. :-)
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    Or a caret if you want to make it unambiguous in the other direction.
wlindley 3y ago
I just read them all as "tiny little indistinguishable blob." Too small to see what they are, and other than the smiley-face and a few others, completely devoid of any meaning. Someone sends me an email and all it says is, "[blob] [blob] [blob]" —? I can't be bothered to read your mind, please re-send using words.
- vsnf 3y ago
  While I sympathize with finding the imagery too small to read quickly, I think this is an elitist attitude that you'll find increasingly separates you from your younger peers. You don't have to lace your own sentences with emoji, but to declare sentences you read that contain them to be devoid of meaning, I think you're prejudicially shutting down lots of dialogue.
pwpw 3y ago
One of my earlier bits of tinkering when I was younger was jailbreaking my iPhone and finding the code in the Japanese iPhone OS build that enabled emojis and using it to enable emojis on my American iPhone. If I recall correctly, I was then able to send them to other iPhones, but of course no one could reciprocate. I thought I was pretty cool! Most people didn’t really understand their point, and it wasn’t until they were added to the American build where people warmed up to them.

104 points by dnetesn 3y ago

Idle comment, I perpetually react poorly to the wink icon, at least, as it appears on Apple devices. I get the sense people intend it to mean "droll wink" which is inclusive and often characteristic of good humored positive "play." For me the icon parses as a more confrontational eyebrow raise, sardonic shading into sarcastic, with a whiff of the scornful, contemptuous, or hostile. It's not a big deal, but it's been years and I still have to hand-hold myself past the intuitive reaction by reminding myself that's almost never how it was meant. I wish you could swap out the glyphs.

WaffleIronMaker 3y ago

I'm surprised to see the spread of emoji attributed to Microsoft in the initial sentences. It's possible that the author may be referring to the smiley faces in extended character pages, or maybe Webdings, but I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically, which I believe to have been petitioned by Google and popularized by Apple. Interesting article either way.

baz00 3y ago
I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK. Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.
  - FFP999 3y ago
    [dead]
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts. See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan. Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively. MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.
      - NikkiA 3y ago
        I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996
    - numpad0 3y ago
      Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.
    - xdennis 3y ago
      You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based. Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- willio58 3y ago
  Yeah the original way to get emojis on iPhone was to go in and enable a keyboard hidden among the Japanese category of languages in settings. While apps existed that just basically gave directions for how to enable that.
aidenn0 3y ago
MSN messenger had a ton of emojis and at the time (around 2000), in my experience, they were used on messenger a lot more than on AIM or ICQ. This is, of course, in the west. As far as Unicode, the impetus for inclusion, while petitioned by Google, was at least officially due to enabling compatibility with Japanese phones where emoji were also quite popular.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  Those were emoticons, they developed separately from the Japanese emoji that we use today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    They were a fixed set of pictures that you could put inline with the text in a message; despite the differing origin, I don't see the distinction.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      The distinction is twofold: 1) The term ‘emoji’ came along with the Japanese emoji on the iPhone. Nobody at the time called MSN/forum emoticons ‘emoji’, so it’s a neologism to say that MSN had emoji. 2) Emoji are a fixed, standardized set that works the same way across the entire OS. 2000s emoticons were implemented separately on each app and website, with differing support and designs everywhere. Some contemporary apps (like Slack and Discord) choose to override the system emoji style and provide their own shortcodes though, so I guess they are like a hybrid of emoji and traditional emoticons.
Nition 3y ago
That first paragraph really put me off the article to be honest. Why read an article on emoji by someone who doesn't know what emoji are? At the same time, I do realise "emoji" is now often being used as a generic term that encompasses both true emoji (unicode-based) and general emoticon images.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xzsinu 3y ago
  I've never heard emoticons referred to as emoji, mainly because people don't use emoticons anymore (unless they still post on forums). It seems like a deliberate editorial decision. I would prefer to preserve the distinction, however, for reasons GP stated.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I use emoticons when texting (because I'm a graybeard), but my phone translates them into emojis before sending. So I've just taken to calling them all emojis.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      My beard might be even greyer because I still think of them as 'smileys' :)
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        It took me years to change the habit of calling them smileys!
    - ClassyJacket 3y ago
      Do you mean you use smileys like :) :( :P ? Emotions were the little images you could place amongst text in MSN Messenger.
omoikane 3y ago
e-moji should be attributed to NTT DoCoMo, who first had it on their feature phones in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji The article above also noted how MSN Messenger and BlackBerry adopted emoji from 2003 onwards.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  MSN Messenger never adopted emoji, they had their own emoticons/smilies that were developed independently. There were no emoji in the west until the iPhone got it in 2011
veave 3y ago
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...
markussss 3y ago
I felt that it was on point to point out Microsoft, as it was the main area where I first started using emojis (before they were emojis, even though it was functionally the same). MSN Messenger came with a nice set of default smileys, and it was very simple to create your own smileys and use them in conversations with others. When other people sent a smiley to you, you could just right click it and add it to your own private repertoire of smileys.
deathanatos 3y ago
Because it's wrong. Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji") Even "emoticons"¹, or pictographs replacing some text like ":-)" (which is how they were called before the west imported "emoji", largely because it showed up in phone IMEs after its inclusion in Unicode) were definitely a thing in the late 90s. I suspect AIM must have had them before Messenger, but frankly, I didn't think anyone actually used Messenger except maybe business types? Everyone I seemed to know was on AIM, with a few odd exceptions on Yahoo, if they were normal. If they were more nerdy, IRC, but that was text based. (Though some clients would still translate certain text sequences into pictures. I'm pretty sure, e.g., Trillian could/would, but I don't remember when I adopted it. But it could have been earlier than 2003.) ¹The picture version. As I recall the usage of this word in the late 90s/early '00s, it could mean either ":-)" as text, or the pictogram version thereof, largely because clients at the time would just convert between the two freely. One end might send text, but the receiving client would pictogram it.
- eonwe 3y ago
  On chat applications: In Finland no one used AIM and everyone used messenger. I suspect this was the norm also elsewhere in Europe. I am talking about Messenger 4.6 that came built in with windows xp and its later versions, not the business version.
  - Ennea 3y ago
    The most popular choice in Germany used to be ICQ, at least based on my own friend group and various conversations I've had over the years.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    In the Netherlands, MSN Messenger (commonly abbreviated just 'MSN') was essentially a monopoly, although at that time it was only used by young people (older people still just called each other on the phone). With the rise of smartphones though, it ended up being supplanted by WhatsApp, with the ill-conceived migration to Skype killing off most of the last stragglers.
kalleboo 3y ago
> I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically Platforms like Slack and Mastodon now let you add what they call "custom emoji" which back in a web forum in 1999 we would have called "smilies", but in any case are definitely not part of unicode. The term has evolved to just mean any graphical smilies/small embedded images

baal80spam 3y ago

It boggles my mind that emoji can be used in an URL.

qingcharles 3y ago
Yeah, I have some emoji domains, though the support is weird. Safari actually supports them best. I keep finding weird places that support emojis, like usernames on some web sites. And someone on HN showed me recently that you can make emoji filenames in Windows at least.
nlunbeck 3y ago
Yeah that was pretty cool, although I guess you run the risk of some browsers presenting it unrendered. If I had a majority of mobile users for a site, I probably wouldn't think twice before using an emoji in my url -- definitely makes it memorable

frereubu 3y ago

I was a hold-out for quite a while, like the author, because they felt very twee. The one that convinced me though was the thumbs-up emoji, which can be an entire reply to an email or text, that says "I've read this, and we don't need to continue the conversation", with undertones of agreement or a thank-you. Somehow single-word replies like "Gotcha" or "Yes" felt too curt, and anything longer invited further discussion where I didn't want any. I don't really use any other emojis though - I love using language too much, and all of the others feel like I can express myself better through words.

dijit 3y ago
Yet (and I'm sorry to generalise); Gen-Z "typically finds thumbs up emoji passive aggressive" https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-emojis-beyond-rude-thumbs-up/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-...
- e40 3y ago
  First, NY Post? F them and the horse they rode in on. They stoke culture wars at every turn. Second, even if it was true (which I doubt), there are some things which should be ignored and someone believing this nonsense should not be coddled. I'm very liberal, but this is just pure nonsense.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    Idk that's how I interpret the thumbs up after I say something. In my mind it's comes off like a dismissive "that's cool". Like what ever I said isn't worthy of a text response. Idk it's a little odd to explain I guess
    - jameshart 3y ago
      I think it means something very different in a work slack thread than a text chat with friends. In a work context, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want to briefly communicate ‘go ahead you have my approval’ and not mean anything snarky by it. Yet if I’m messaging with my friends and they ask about going for drinks Saturday, and I say ‘go ahead, you have my approval’, that’s going to come off as pretty passive aggressive too.

helloworld 3y ago

This link in the article about the history of the :-) emoticon -- proposed by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon on September 19, 1982 -- is really fascinating: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

orzi 3y ago

Oh my, Internet, what have you done with smileys ;( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

ttoinou 3y ago

Did you know ? Eastern europeans end words (without space) with singles characters "(" and ")" to indicate full smileys. Only themselves understand each others and they dont tell anyone about it)))

agubelu 3y ago
Why eastern europeans in particular? Is it somehow related to slavic languages? Now I'm curious
- Tenoke 3y ago
  I'm guessing they are overgeneralizing since I'm a Bulgarian and I haven't really seen anyone do that.
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    I also thought it was an Eastern European thing. Would be nice to see a map of prevalence of this trend.
  - ttoinou 3y ago
    Yeah sorry I meant far-eastern europeans
- sznio 3y ago
  It's the Russian keyboard layout that makes ":" difficult to type. In Poland we just use the US keyboard layout so that's not a problem. I assume it's similar for other non-cyrillic slavic languages.
  - ttoinou 3y ago
    Weird, I've seen poles do that
akarlsten 3y ago
From my old WoW-playing days, I was given to understand that : was awkward to reach on cyrillic keyboards, so many of the russians skipped it and just used ) or even %) sometimes (which sort of looks like eyes and a nose if you squint)

sickcodebruh 3y ago

I was also a holdout until I saw emojis described as "body language for text". That helps contextualize them and let me appreciate them. They let you add so much nuance and personality to text. In a world of async communication, they can be crucial signifiers of intent.

noman-land 3y ago
I was just about to write this. Emoji not only takes the place of body language and facial expressions over a textual medium, but gifs and other pictograms are a whole linguistic and almost hieroglyphic medium of shared cultural communication.
raincole 3y ago
Unless you're specifically trained for that, it's very hard to fake body language and facial expression. That's the whole point to it. And it doesn't apply to emoji.

labster 3y ago

I’m starting to think that Hacker News is on the wrong side of history on this one. Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. Emoji are becoming a permanent part of written language. I don’t want to see a post full of emoji either, but perhaps a filter that allows one emoji per 20 words would work. Perhaps using a font with black line or grayscale emoji?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
computerfriend 3y ago
I don't hate emoji (any more -- the article also describes my own experiences warming up to them). I'd hate to see them on HN though. :(
sznio 3y ago
> Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. For me at least, seeing emoji makes me even more uncertain about the meaning of the message.
cglong 3y ago
This is why I love Google's Noto Emoji font: https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/what-is-black-and-white-and-read-all.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/what-is-black-and-...
layer8 3y ago
You can use emoticons or kaomoji perfectly fine if you want. ^_– ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tgv 3y ago
It's not an emotional channel, at least not purely. And you can express that very well in text, too. You just need to cut the irony and sarcasm. For the (rather dumb and contrived) examples from the article * Unfortunately, her cake she was terrible. * Her cake was such a failure, I had to laugh. * She made a nice cake.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Emojis in written text can lose their meaning in translation. Your intended meaning may not be what your audience understands, but I guess that’s inherent in most communication. I had a bunch of russian coworkers once, and one of them would constantly type “)))” any time I asked him a question. I thought it was some weird cyrillic keyboard quirk and never paid it any mind, until I learned it’s the approximate russian equivalent for “lol.” Didn’t know what to make of him after that. I guess he thought I was a moron.

veave 3y ago
Russians do that. The first time I noticed it was in Counter-Strike. They would type ))) and the messages would look like this: Vladimir : ))) So I thought that they "reused" the colon that separated the name from the message. That was my theory at least...
hammock 3y ago
))) is just a beaming smile... derived from :) but without the eyes. Not exclusively Russian Separately, I remember years ago doing social media competitive audits and someone saw >>>>>> in there and thought it was errant text. E.g. "Taco Bell >>>>>>>". Of course what it means is Taco Bell is better than everything
- computerfriend 3y ago
  Git conflict emoji.
- watwut 3y ago
  I would interpret it as "leaving for Taco Bell"
- codq 3y ago
  Kinda adds a whole new layer to the drone metal band sunnO)))
skocznymroczny 3y ago
Yeah, )) is fairly common in Russia and neighboring countries such as Belarus or Armenia. Another one I encountered at work was a Taiwanese coworker ending sentences with a ~ character which apparently indicates "cute" / "playful"

lapcat 3y ago

I quit using emoji entirely almost 5 years ago, though I do continue to use a few simple emoticons. https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1047223298113896450 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/104722329811389645... My reasons: "There's a method to my madness. You see, gifs are trivially infinitely extensible and backward compatible. Whereas each new emoji requires an addition to Unicode and software updates. And the demand for more emoji is insatiable. That system is not practical or scalable." (I mentioned gifs there because I was known to frequently post gifs.) https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1052769660846952448 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/105276966084695244...

noman-land 3y ago
I think the big difference between gif and emoji is that you need to see a gif to know what it represents.
- lapcat 3y ago
  You mean in terms of accessibility? The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text. Apparently emoji aren't the greatest for accessibility: https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/ https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/ It may be even worse for emoticons, so that's a legitimate criticism: https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-properly-66b73986b803 https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-...
  - fikama 3y ago
    What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs. To understand a meaning of a word/emoji/gif you have to see it in context several times or look up a definition. (with emojis and gifs there is additional problem in lack of dictionaries for them). When amount of words in a language is finite or they are extending slowly (emoji) I ma able to keep up with thier meanings as opposed to gifs and memes. Which are evolving to quickly for me to keep up.

hbn 3y ago

I think the biggest issue with (modern, unicode) emoji has been the different art used between OS/platform. It seems like everyone is kind of converging on making their emojis convey the same emotion as Apple's (which is probably the right move since Apple popularized them, and they're baked into a ton of images that have been circulating for years) Samsung had some rough emojis for a while. Look at their old "grimacing" face. Or the old cookies emoji that they made saltine crackers. Or their eye roll emoji which was a sarcastic eye roll on Apple, but Samsung had it as a cute smile. I'm sure that caused many a communication issue.

throwmeout123 3y ago

They make sense as reactions but are absolutely awful in prose. Emoji spam (specially rocket) is the litmus test for “people i dont want to work with”

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
One-character reactions are the only acceptable use of emoji. (I also judge anyone who stresses the second syllable of 'emoji', which is basically everyone.)
wlesieutre 3y ago
Similarly, any email with an emoji in the subject line is an email I'm not going to read EDIT - guilty party in my inbox today is Newegg, twice. I should unsubscribe from those.

beauHD 3y ago

I don't know where I read it, but apparently older people use emojis to feel 'with it' and cool, whereas the younger crowd barely use them. (I could be wrong, and I have no source, so don't quote me on this). Also emojis are yet another data point to do things like sentiment analysis, and have been weaponized by social media companies to target more relevant ADs at you. Tweeted/X'd the beer emoji? Get ready for Heineken ADs.

paganel 3y ago
> whereas the younger crowd barely use them. ( As far as I can tell the emojis thing is (has been) mostly a millenials thing, the zoomers are mostly on the side of AAVE-speak and such related jargon (the famous fr fr, for example, even actively avoiding capitalisation is now seen as a thing). So, yeah, I'd say that the emojis have passed the peak of cool relevancy, hence why they're discussed on this quite boring forum by definitely not cool men in their late 20s and 30s (I'm a definitely not cool man in my early 40s myself).

overgard 3y ago

It's funny the way language is evolving; even things like how you use punctuation and capitalization now has meaning. Like 20 years ago, if I was sending an IM or something, I would always just write like I'm writing here. But now, if I'm sending someone a text or slack or something, I always feel like it's more casual/less try hard if it's lowercase with relaxed punctuation. (That's just my style, I don't expect others to match). If I end a text with a period and everything properly capitalized, I almost feel like I'm being too formal. (Admittedly, some people probably just think I'm sloppy and lazy!) I never got into writing "u" or "ur" though. For some reason those still bug me. I know a lot of people don't like memes or gifs, but actually, I think they're great. Sometimes it's much more effective to express a sentiment with an image instead of a word or phrase. I always feel a little cringe when I end a sentence in lol, like I'm laughing at my own joke, although sometimes it helps to soften something I'm saying.

graypegg 3y ago
ASL has some casual register signs that are simplified or single hand versions of complex signs [1] that only came about from people chatting more casually. The original version goes from being the only word, to being the formal word for that idea. I think humans just tend towards registers of communication, regardless of the medium. [1] https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson27.htm https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson27.htm

jodrellblank 3y ago

I'm starting to find them emotionally manipulative in a bad way. FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser. Especially when I'm using BrowserTamer[1] to intercept all URL launches so I can feed a few work URLs to Edge and Chrome, and FireFox as the default for everything else, so it effectively is my default browser. It's not the only piece of software behaving somewhat like that, either. [1] https://www.aloneguid.uk/projects/bt https://www.aloneguid.uk/projects/bt

hammock 3y ago
>FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser. The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you. Also - what about iPhones stubbornly showing green texts from Android messagers? That's not even "I'm sad you're using Android." It's more a passive-aggressive "I'm going to degrade your experience because your friend uses Android." Forget about emojis- Apple is weaponizing colors!
- overgard 3y ago
  To be fair, the blue/green thing is kinda useful, I don't use a ton of apple-ecosystem exclusive things but it's nice to tell when I can or not.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  What's emotionally manipulative about "should"? ... what's degrading about green?
  - exac 3y ago
    Look at the re-sale market for used iPhones. Youth do not want to be caught dead with Android phones.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago

diego_sandoval 3y ago

While useful, I think that emojis should not have been included in Unicode. Unicode is supposed to be a universal standard, but the inclusion and exclusion of some emojis is an ideological issue. The inclusion and wide usage of emojis gives the Unicode consortium a disproportionate degree of influence over the way we communicate.

uxamanda 3y ago

This podcast had an interesting deep dive on the history of on emoji recently - https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology She went into the unicode side of things as well.

new_user_final 3y ago

♥

Kiro 3y ago
How is this possible? I thought HN stripped emojis.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  It's the “black heart suit”.
  - bloak 3y ago
    Yes, it's U+2665, which is considered to be an emoji according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode, though U+2661 ("white heart suit", ♡) isn't. Probably HN treats ♥ and ♡ the same way, as ordinary characters, though.

d--b 3y ago

Emojis are used mostly in 2 ways: punctuating a sentence so that it’s tone is less ambiguous. A shortcut for an emotional state that is not dissimilar to writing “haha” “ew” or “meh”. As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons and can’t possibly imagine a world where emojis didn't exist. But I m surprised no one mentions the “!” or other stylistic tools like all caps. These are “contextual modifiers” for text that have existed for ages. Some languages do have sarcasm punctuation and possibly small adverbs that annotate some kind of emotional state. So basically yes, the article is right, emojis work mostly like words, but for me it’s just a continuation of what existed before (punctuation and onomatopoeia), and its extension and spread was made possible by the technology (an imposed vocabulary and convenient keyboard).

m0llusk 3y ago
commonly also used as tags on forum posts
herodoturtle 3y ago
> As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons Username checks out! (And I completely agree with your last point ^_^)
wildrhythms 3y ago
An article on this topic I like: Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation >"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on." >"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh and passive-aggressive," said Juan Abenante Rincon, 24, a social media manager for Adidas. "Like, are you mad? What's going on? Like, did I do something wrong?" https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your-kid-make-sure-to-double-check-your-punctuation https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...
- brightlancer 3y ago

pingou 3y ago

Does anymore understand "the cake she made was terrible ;)" as ironic? To me the 3 sentences have all the same meaning, the emoji would just represent the way the person feels about it now. And perhaps with the ;), it could mean that they talked about how the person is a terrible cook before.

taylorius 3y ago

I don't like the overly cute emoticon "fonts" that some messengers use. Away into the night with those super smug looking apple cheeked smilies.

ryandv 3y ago

I find it disturbing that we consider emoji sufficiently expressive to stand in for the depth of meaning that a well-crafted passage can convey. In particular, I have lamented the paucity of information that modern short form social media - 280 character Tweets; 10 second shorts; soundbytes, quips, and shitposts on Reddit - is able to carry. There simply is not enough information within the medium to sufficiently disambiguate the multiple senses and interpretations one can read into the message, and I believe it is this lack of being able to even agree on what is being said that leads to so much miscommunication and conflict today. After all, any reading or interpretation of a message requires some form of _projection_ on the audience's part onto the canvas of the medium. Frege once wrote, "Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea." [0] Perhaps it is for this reason that Victorian-era writers (John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" comes to mind) employed such a flowery and verbose brand of English; it is only by sketching out their ideas in high enough resolution that one can have some hope in hell of conveying an idea to their reader, intact and bearing at least some resemblance to whatever it is they had in mind. To steal an idea from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 4.026: "The meanings of the simple signs (the words) must be explained to us, if we are to understand them." If one does not take the time to expand upon the definitions or the subtleties of the words, signs, or emoji they use, it is no surprise that some misunderstanding may arise. Why then, do we suppose that emoji will indeed communicate, unambiguously, the shades and nuances of meaning that we intend, simply because they bear some resemblance to a real-world object or common symbol? Did you contextualize its usage adequately? Is that picture indeed "worth a thousand words?" Which thousand did you choose when you last punched in that heart emoji? Emoji have progressed to a fourth-order simulacrum, in Baudrillard's terminology: "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever." Where perhaps emoji once may have been able to refer to the depth of meaning, the underlying reality to which they point, I find they are now carelessly thrown around, often, as another commenter has mentioned below, towards manipulative ends. Even the simple heart emoji is not something I've even used with my father over iMessage until very recently. Love is after all, a very powerful concept, and yet here we are, throwing it around willy-nilly, left and right, to people we haven't even met in person - or worse, _next to the links to purchase reddit premium or reddit gold._ Far from being an actual message of _agape_ or even _philia,_ which may have been a function of a first-order simulacrum, where the map accurately reflected the territory, it has become a hollow icon, meant to evoke some sentiment or feeling in the reader by its presentation alone, and not by virtue of its connection to some actual underlying sense of love. Baudrillard also writes: "All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?" I am not a Christian, or perhaps even a religious man, but the example is quite poignant. Can you draw me an emoji, an icon, of what was once taken to be the highest and most ineffable concept? And if emoji can fall short of communicating one ideal, why not others? Yet here we are, exchanging hollow signs in a lifeless, meaningless formal system of cold syntax, bereft of semantics. [0] http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf

teknopaul 3y ago

How can American authors write text that says Microsoft introduced... then a word like "Emoji" that is so obviously Japanese Authors still see the world through a lens, that until its big in US, it does not really exist, and then associate it to the US company that copied it first.

avery17 3y ago
Emoji means pictograph in japanese. I think it's fair to say that Americans "coined" the term as a name word for the characters where as the japanese were simply describing the characters literally.
skhr0680 3y ago
I'm guessing the author is refereing to emoticons from MSN Messenger. I don't think the term "emoji" gained popularity in the west until the iPhone came out, and made emoji wildly popular because of the one secret trick you had to do to enable the keyboard on non-Japanese phones.
- Macha 3y ago
  Also emojis are a derivative of emoticons (or smileys, as they were called if you went far enough back): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

eimrine 3y ago

What is the difference between "the cake she made was terrible :-)" and "the cake she made was terrible :-("?

lazyweb 3y ago
"I still ate some and feel fine" vs. "I've been sitting on the toilet for the last 25 minutes".
vsnf 3y ago
The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies read to me like malicious intent vs agreeable disappointment. I.e., "The cake that horrible coworker of mine made was terrible, and everyone hated it. I delight in this schadenfreude." vs "The cake my loving and adorable girlfriend made me for my birthday was terrible, and while I appreciate the effort, it was hard to stomach. "
- eimrine 3y ago
  > The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies (...) Russian smiles are even more advanced. They use only one sign ")" and "(". Of course you can multiply them.

codethief 3y ago

I still don't understand why emojis had to be added to Unicode. Sure, it helped with adoption but now we've got descriptive glyphs ("beaming face with smiling eyes") but every font displays them slightly or sometimes even very differently. In some cases, depending on what phone/font my conversation partner uses, we might interpret emojis completely differently and we won't even know!

sethammons 3y ago

> It turns out that a world freshly speckled with [emoji smile] is not really such a changed world after all. I've recently discovered there is a generational gap in smiley usage :) If you are younger, my ":)" above can be taken more as a condescending smirk that puts down the reader. If you are older, it is just a smile and signifies that I'm, well, what a smile usually means: I'm being friendly, happy, non-threatening. I apparently now have to watch how I use smileys because younger people have started interpreting the symbol, imho, incorrectly :( (I am unaware if a similar proviso extends to the sad face above)

fouc 3y ago
Actually even on IRC in the 90's, sometimes :) was sarcastic, really depended on context anyways. 5% chance of sarcasm. Internet is a highly sarcastic world so it's not a surprise that people eventually perceive it to be more sarcastic than it should be I suppose. You can just add a - to make it unambiguous. :-)
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  Or a caret if you want to make it unambiguous in the other direction.

wlindley 3y ago

I just read them all as "tiny little indistinguishable blob." Too small to see what they are, and other than the smiley-face and a few others, completely devoid of any meaning. Someone sends me an email and all it says is, "[blob] [blob] [blob]" —? I can't be bothered to read your mind, please re-send using words.

vsnf 3y ago
While I sympathize with finding the imagery too small to read quickly, I think this is an elitist attitude that you'll find increasingly separates you from your younger peers. You don't have to lace your own sentences with emoji, but to declare sentences you read that contain them to be devoid of meaning, I think you're prejudicially shutting down lots of dialogue.

pwpw 3y ago

One of my earlier bits of tinkering when I was younger was jailbreaking my iPhone and finding the code in the Japanese iPhone OS build that enabled emojis and using it to enable emojis on my American iPhone. If I recall correctly, I was then able to send them to other iPhones, but of course no one could reciprocate. I thought I was pretty cool! Most people didn’t really understand their point, and it wasn’t until they were added to the American build where people warmed up to them.