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Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons? (lemmy.today)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

290 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reading comments in different communities, I noticed that users hardly leave smilies. Why is that?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why I personally don't use emoji that often, especially on Lemmy, in no particular order:

I don't feel the need to indicate emotion or facial expression as much as in a personal conversation.
combination of a high resolution monitor I'm sitting kind of far away from makes most of them look like nearly identical yellow circles.
There's like nine variations of sticking tongue out. And a lot of them were decided by the Japanese so a thing that looks like it's teasing officially means "I AM DISRESPECTFUL TO DIRT" so emoji are generators of misunderstanding. Especially when different systems render them differently so a face that looks scared on a Samsung might look angry on an Apple or like an office building on a PC.
I'm on a PC, typing on an actual keyboard. To insert an emoji, I have to move my hand to a mouse and navigate a menu. That menu isn't provided by the system itself; it may or may not be provided by the text box itself, and they're all different and have their own quirks. And I'm sick of learning them.
I just can't help it, the habit some folks have of either replacing nouns with emoji aka "I went to the 🏜️ and crammed a 🌵 up my 🍑 and now it's ⭕ " or even worse the MLM Hun tactic of typing the word outright then adding a corresponding emoji just feels childish and dumb to me.

Call me an old man yelling at cloud if you want but simple shit like :) worked for conveying emotional tone or facial expression in a way that emoji just don't. Like consider these two: 😀 😃 "Smiling face" and "Smiling face with big eyes." Without them right next to each other, you probably wouldn't realize the difference, so why are they both in the standard?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's an interesting question. Many other emoticons in the standard set are just as questionable. It is especially interesting to find out who came up with this set and decided that this number of emoticons and their varieties is what the user needs.

As for the fact that the mobile emoji set looks too small for desktop pc, perhaps Lemmy should make her own emoji set?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Who came up with them: Japanese telecom companies. Back when doing their version of SMS, they found they had some room left over in the character set, so they included some little pictures you could send as if they were text characters. The Unicode Consortium included them in the Unicode standard, and Apple quietly included support for them in the iOS onscreen keyboard. They put it in there for Japanese users, but left it in for the rest of the world as well. And in the words of Tom Scott, some westerner found out "I can send piles of poo to my friends!"

This is why some of them are...slightly strange. "Levitating man in a suit" was some company's logo. The face that is exhaling clouds of steam is labeled "triumph" when in the west we associate that image with aggression, anger and frustration. It's why there's an emoji for "love hotel." Emoji have since been adopted worldwide and expanded...possibly excessively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Afaik the red "O" means ok in japanese while the "X" means.

That example kinda makes it even funnier :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The X means....... What?? Don't leave me hanging!;

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

No.

spoiler

That's the joke.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

See amd I was just going for "a red hole." emoji are useless for communicating.