Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons?

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

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

288 comments

No idea, here's a sword
cxxx[::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>

second a few other comments, a lot of people conflating emoticons and emojis
emoticon: ¯(ツ)_/¯
emoji: 🤷
emoticon: =>.^<=
emoji: 🐱
- It's understandable. Back in the old old days, these 😱 were often called emoticons. The reason was that the chat software that people used to automatically replaced ;-) by 😉. The menu was the same and the name of this menu was emoticon.
  One of the most famous example of this is MSN Messenger.
  People keep the habit to call them emoticons.
  
  In the old old days, emojis didn’t exist yet, until NTT DoCoMo created them for mobile phones. Emoticons predate them.
- I propose that we call the symbols in both emoticons and emoji "emos".
  
  And we call emos, goths
  I wonder what happened to all the emo girls
- Very true. Also, I believe you forgot to escape the 2nd symbol? I think it should look like this:
  undefined
  
  =>\^.\^<=
  =>.<=

For me emoticons were something that started when all of the boomers came to Facebook. Floods and floods of useless emojis left and right. So now I feel weird using them, like I'm cheapening the platform while also acting like the people that ruined Facebook for me
- Are emojis considered emoticons? Call me old but I think this is an emoticon ;-) and this is an emoji 😉
  
  Agreed! Although the little image things on message boards like phpBB, ProBoards and Invision were also emoticons, even though they were basically early onset emojis
- Emoticons are old internet. Emojis are boomer, normie, and corpo friendly translations.
  
  Who is booing this man? He is completely correct
  
  Wait, who was using "old Internet" if not boomers?
- I have a negative attitude to standard emoticons built into Android and iOS. They don’t look good, they’re too many.
  I'm interested to know who uses emoticons depicting, for example, player rewind icons or rectangular shapes. Are there people who use these emoticons at least once a year?
  
  I make apps and I use them for prototyping buttons and stuff... So yeah, pretty often.

My hypothesis: Lemmy has an older userbase, and in general older people feel less of a need to express their emotions. They're busier discussing the topic than highlighting their attitude towards it.
Perhaps cultural reinforcement plays a role, too. As emoticons and emojis are less used, they feel more out of place, so people who'd use them elsewhere avoid them here.
- My 80 old father-in-law spams emoticons like he's a 15 year old girl. Cringe-worthy and hillarious at the same time 😂
  
  I have stopped contacting family members because the constant emoji spam kills all desire to have a conversation with them. Feels like empty meaningless chatter.
- I only use emoticons to clarify an emotional message. On forums, I'm more interested in sharing and discussing ideas and opinions. Emoticon spam makes me sick with worthless cringe.
- I use emojis only because my phone suggests them at the end of sentences 🙃

Personally I feel like if I need to use one, then I've done a poor job of writing.
I guess the other component is that I write a lot at work (I'm an engineering manager) and emoticons aren't really appropriate for that kind of communication, so I'm not in the habit of using them.
- ¯⁠\⁠_⁠༼⁠ᴼ⁠ل͜⁠ᴼ⁠༽⁠_⁠/⁠¯
  
  Such an emoji can be sent to a customer when all deadlines have passed.
- What kind of engineering manager isn’t using a dramatic shrug emoji or emoticon dozens of times every day?!
  Don’t tell me your team has their shit together.
  
  I prefer to walk to their desks and make the expressions and gestures in person.
- 😂 what!? I've worked with 11 engineering managers and they've all used emojis. You're either not in software or you work for a bank/insurance.
  
  Not sure what to tell you, I'm the senior manager for software engineering in a company that makes rocket engines, solid rocket motors, and space electrical power systems. I've been working there for 38 years and emojis are pretty rare.

All these people singing the praises of emoticons over emojis, and not a single XD to be seen. I know you're old enough to remember the XD times! XD you cowards!
- I xD all the time 😤
- I like to throw it around sometimes, especially when I need to soften a statement or when someone says something so stupid I can't help but laugh XD

Emoticons are representations of emotions. We don't have those. We're dead inside.

ITT: People conflating emojis and emoticons.
- In msn messenger emoticons were what emojis are today. So to me emoticons and emojis are the same... i dont what to call the things op refers to... maybe ASCII emoticons?
  Edit: turns out im wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon
  Edit: sort of wrong... emojis are also officially called emoticons
  
  It probably doesn't help that a lot of things will take your emoticons and automatically convert them into emojis for you. Like you type :-) and it changes it to 🙂 without even asking. I've run into this in a lot of chat clients.
- Yeah, I'm confused. I do use emoticons and I rarely use emojis. What half of that is relevant here?
- Does the distinction truly matter?
  
  In some ways no, but communication is complicated. Emoticons and emojis feel different when used I feel like. :) and 🙂 is not the same.
  They're also used by different generations of people I think. So in that way it is meaningful to talk about them as separate concepts.

Emoticons are like swear words.
I use them sparingly not because I disapprove of them, but to preserve their effectiveness.
- I have been sparing the almighty hell out of mine. When they drop it will be epic.

We don't like when people add color to our monochromatic text.

Just for you
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
ಠ_ಠ
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
┬──┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)
¯(ツ)/¯
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
(👁 ͜ʖ👁)
(งツ)ว
ʘ‿ʘ
ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
[̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]
(シ_ _)シ
- ಠ_ಠ
- Few more for the set:
  (ｏ・・)ノ”(ᴗ ᴗ。)
  (╹╭╮╹)凸
  凸(｀⌒´メ)凸
  (っ˘з(˘⌣˘ )
  ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ
  (∽_∼) ,p
  (∂︹6) ,p
  [¬º-°]¬
  ٩( ᐛ )و
  =͟͟͞͞ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
  ♫•¨•.¸¸♪ (ง ื▿ ื)ว٩(･ิᴗ･ิ๑)۶ ♫•¨•.¸¸♪
  ( ͡❛ ͜ʖ ͡❛)
  ( ͡°Ĺ̯ ͡° )
  ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
  ｢(ﾟﾍﾟ)
  (゜-゜)
  (っ˘ڡ˘ς)
- (ಥ ͜ʖಥ)
- Sync?

I find them obnoxius, just like inserting animated gifs and meme responses. If used in serious context it makes the whole post look cringe, using them to replace words is fit only for smartphone troglodytes sending character-limited posts/SMS.
- I use them as a complement in my messages where I want to convey an emotion which isn't obvious from the text itself. Like if I'm being self-deprecating in a joking manner, e.g. Not very easy to convey in text. But if I add some kind of smiling-ish emoji or something, it's clearer that I'm not serious.
  Overuse is cringe however.
  
  If something isn't obvious from the text, why not change the /style/ of writing instead of appending dissonant graphics? Make it obviously sarcastic or humorous, instead of leaving the users guessing if its satire or sincere expression.
- (⌐■_■)
- (⁠⊙⁠_⁠◎⁠)
- 👌💥
  
  🤣
- 👍

¯(ツ)/¯

People on Reddit rarely did, and I feel like this behavior has spread to Lemmy.
- True, it's basically culture.
  I use them for texts but never for Lemmy or reddit.

A lot of us came from reddit where it was considered taboo to use emojis.
- Also Reddit didn’t support emojis for a long time. But yeah, it was considered very “normie” (hate that term but applicable)
- But emoticons usually didn't see the same hate though :)
- Wow, I didn't know that. You don't know the reason?
  
  You looked like you were fresh off the bus from Facebook.

The yoots make fun of me when I do :(
- It's sad. 🙁
  
  😂👆 🤡🤡🤡

¯(ツ)_/¯
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
- ┬──┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)
  
  (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

I think most oldies are embarrassed by them. I'm not though, but I only surf the world wide web from my phone, so perhaps I'm more hip 😎
- I think people 😘 find them more obnoxious 😱 than informative, and rate 💯 opinions higher than 😜 emotional reactions, because emotions are 🤑 cheap and add nothing to a constructive 🏗️ discussion
  
  This sums it up. It's meaningless noise. I wish there were a stable way of removing all emojis from a page via browser extension. Chrome's kinda broke youtube comments, filtering out comments that didn't have emojis, haven't looked for a firefox replacement yet.
  
  Emotional Italians will disagree with you.
  
  I'll probably respond here instead of under the post: I use emojis to denote sarcasm or strong reactions usually, so I don't feel the need to spray posts with them.
  Otoh they do have an ability to make anything seem silly and/or advertising 😅 so for the comical effect, why not 乁⁠(⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠Ĺ̯⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠)⁠ ⁠ㄏ
  
  I mean, if the words are still there its literally nothing else left but personal tastes. It adds, not subtracts, even if people dislike it. The disliker certainly isnt realesed from their obligation to answer the question if they so crave being heard
- 🤟 That's... Metal, man.
- Emoji give us an extra avenue of encoding emotion into our text, something that is usually difficult. So I think everyone should be using them 🤓
  
  I thought I understood your comment until I got to the emoji. I'm not sure if they work terribly well

Aside from using them in reactions during discussions with group that I know (Discord, Chat/Hangouts), they're too fuzzy in definition to be useful in conversations. When reading on Lemmy if I run into emoticons, I just skip over them as noise in the stream. I don't even try to figure out what the person is trying to convey since I'm not going to be able to track whatever the latest trends are in their meaning. It's the same reason you don't spam a public forum like this with youth slang if you want to communicate with a wide demographic of members.
- I didn't realise the meaning of emoticons could change. Now I'm thinking 'what if the cat image I put at the end of the text means something bad?' 😾
  
  As a cat owner, can confirm cats are always bad. The best bad decisions I've made, are my two little fuzz balls. And I hope they're happy with me as well.
  They are the reason we don't have a Christmas tree anymore.

We prefer to use our words.
- It almost feels like talking to a child when I see emoji spam from people. Emojis are just cheap, which makes them way less valuable by definition and added visual noise distracts from the point.

¯(ツ)_/¯
- Your arm's off!
  
  Tis but a flesh wound
  
  on Jerboa his arm is missing, but re appears when I enter the "reply" window 🤔

Everything after ascii art was a mistake. It feels childish to use emoticons, a lot of users here grew up on platforms that only had text and to see emoticons is jarring. Needing to use an image for emotional context is poor writing.
- Me personally I feel like it's less about seeing them and more that I see so many.

I'm coming from the old ages of internet where we didn't have them. I'm fine with them, but I'm too old to use them comfortably.
It's fine. Use them if you like, but I don't really see the value in systems such as Discord where you pay money to have special emojis and so on...
- Scott E. Fahlman proposed using :-) and :-( to mark jokes and not-jokes respectively in internet posts in 1982, and they (and lots of variations) have been in use ever since. IBM's Codepage 437 character set (as used by the original PC) had two dedicated smiley characters even before that.
  There was no golden age of the internet where there were no emoticons.
- Old internet days you went to a site to make them for you and you copy pasted them into some stupid AOL/ICQ chat , and then later on for me irc. Now they are part of a lot of clients UI. (⌐■_■)
- I’m coming from the old ages of internet where we didn’t have them.
  You're talking about emojis. OP is talking about emoticons. They are not the same. Emoji = 🙂, emoticon = :)

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?
- 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?
  
  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.
- Afaik the red "O" means ok in japanese while the "X" means.
  That example kinda makes it even funnier :D
  
  The X means....... What?? Don't leave me hanging!;
  
  See amd I was just going for "a red hole." emoji are useless for communicating.

I can use them if I want. 🙂
I just don't feel like it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- They just take so much work to type or find when emojis look the same 😏 like it's literally the same thing just coloured in a picture

you dont even have a pfp
- Back in my day we called them avatars, youngster!
  
  And we used to have to manually write the hexadecimal values of colors in arrays by hand to generate them. Uphill, both ways.

well I don't have such a menu for those premade faces, so I just use emoji's instead..., those larger ones take up too much space imo.
I'll use :) , :(, :/, :P, :D, :|, ;) :O, XD... they are nice and compact and get the point across.
- I'm used to calling those emoticons. Emojis are things like 👶🦈🎶
  
  I think what they're saying is that they don't use the larger emoticons because they don't have a menu of them, so they mostly use emojis instead, but they'll sometimes use the smaller emoticons.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ:･ﾟ✧
- I adore how sparkle happy this one is <3

I don't like to have to press a button, then search for an emoji. Emoticons are faster to write, I mostly use the :), :/, etc.
I changed that in Mastodon, for example. Someone told me that screen readers have trouble reading emoticons, so I mostly use stickers or emojis there.
- That's very thoughtful of you colon right parenthesis
  
  ¯(ツ)/¯

Usually I only use them when I personally know who I'm talking to. Because who knows how a random person will react to an emoji, misunderstanding their meaning, unintentionally or intentionally.
I also sometimes use them to indicate how casual my post is and should not be taken too seriously.
- ☃️

Don't generally see a reason to
- ➕
  
  I use this emoji so much in my team chat instead of a thumbs up lol
  
  😆

8===D

Because this isn't Reddit.. I'm after quality discussions
- The double period is simultaneously the most elderly thing and outside of any style guide.
  
  You're spot on. I'm turning 40 in a few weeks

I'm on desktop :(
- On Windows: Win + .
  
  Would you look at that, TIL!
  I'll forget tomorrow though.
  
  Same on Linux (using KDE plasma)
  
  Cmd+Ctrl+Space on MacOS
  
  On the Moon: Ganymede
- on linux: ibus
- There is a tab with emoticons in the text input field of Lemmy's posts. At least in the mobile version of the site.

Well, personally, I grew up with more primitive emoticons and usually just eschew including smiles entirely. I'll use them with friends but I tend to communicate more formally in public forums.

If I had to guess… it’s because most people on Lemmy are over the age of 12?
- You angered a few of the rugrats with that comment.

ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Haven't felt the need to use them as often. Emojis and "lol haha" work fine for me.
- This is the first time I ever saw someone actually use the Inuktitut script.
  
  Ah I wasn't aware which script it was. It's just one of the emoticons available in Sync for Lemmy.

For some reason emojis just feel out of the place here and reddit. I do use them in private chats and whatnot though

Voyager has them
༼∩☉ل͜☉༽⊃━☆ﾟ. * ･｡ﾟ
- (ง ื▿ ื)ว ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
  Oh my god, I'd never tried tapping this button before.
  
  [ಥ_ಥ] oh gah
  
  What button is it? When I type a comment on mobile Voyager I only see link, bold, italic, and quote buttons. It doesn't seem like I can swipe to find more buttons either.
- (°▽°)/

Because we're adults.
- Boooooring
- Examines finances.
  Wife? We'll need to cut down on the toilet paper this year.
  Ok honey. But how about cutting down drinking beer to five times a week instead of seven?

In-group signalling. One of the many microhabits you need to acquire in order to fit in with the local culture and nothing more. As usual, people make up reasons to justify why their cultural proclivities are objectively right but these are without exception completely post-hoc.

¯(ツ)_/¯
- Here, you dropped this: \
  
  I'm not sure why it does that. The slash was definitely in there.
  ¯(ツ)_/¯
  Edit: other people are apparently having this issue
  ¯(ツ)_/¯
- You dropped your arm

⊂⁠(⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠*⁠⊂⁠)
- ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
  
  ლ⁠(⁠◕⁠ω⁠◕⁠ლ⁠)

It's a pain with markdown.
- Sync for Lemmy has a menu of them to insert into your comments.
  ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
  
  Same for boost, don't think I've ever used it before though ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

ಠ_ಠ

We must change them!
Require them to symbolically emote at least once per post/comment.
 
:-}
- :•|
- ..

Emojis really don't have a use outside of shitpost communities. I very rarely will use them here on Lemmy

I think my Lemmy client does not support emojis, but it supports Lenny faces. Maybe that's why, Lemmy loves Lenny ʕ ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°ʔ

use your words!

Because you don't have no script to easily add emoticons, like for /kbin? ¯( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)/¯
- Missing an arm ¯( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)/¯ Boost escapes it correctly though, no need for kbin
- For you:

People use words to express their feelings rather than emojis.
Emojis are less serious and a comment that uses them extensively is taken much less seriously than a comment without emojis.
- Perhaps this impression is due to the fact that young social media users have devalued these images. You may have seen short messages in various communities consisting of many emoticons. Perhaps the sequence of images means something, but is perceived as spam.

288 comments