The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter | Hacker News Reader

The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter

research.facebook.com

61 pointsanand-s16 comments

I'm surprised "lol" is so uncommon... only 1.9%. I see it more often than haha I think... Also no mention of rofl? Or lmao? Or kekeke? Odd...

And by emoji, do they mean the Japanese ones? Because smileys and emoticons existed long before emoji...

Maybe the facebook users are different than the internet crowd I know (mostly forums).

Footnote 2 seems to be a listing of the regexes used. It seems emoji means "some of the smilies we automatically replace with images".

I hear kids these days are using lel a lot.

Also, no muhaha or muahaha etc... but I suppose those wouldn't match too many.

> Or kekeke

That's perhaps mainly an online gaming thing? My korean friends simply type Kkk. And chinese hihi/哈, thai 555, etc - a regex nightmare to be sure

I'm sad they didn't show how many people use "teeheehee." I don't know when I started that habit but now I'm using it occasionally.

I wonder about geographical and global (that is different countries and languages) effects. In my experience the 'hehe' or even 'eheh' is a much more common European statement than the 'haha' of the Anglophone world. I know Facebook restricted themselves to the US, but a global study would be very interesting...

It doesn't say whether Private Messages were analysed, assuming not.

What's frustrating about PMs at the moment on FB is that only on the mobile apps is it easy to use emojis. The smiley-face link on the messenger.com interface & the facebook.com domains only provide a choice of "stickers" (which are awful). So unless you know the keyboard shortcuts off-heart you're stuck using plaintext.

It does say this as a footnote:

   "We limit this study to posts and comments and do not look at direct messages through Messenger."

I'd love to know why Wyoming, of all places, appears to use only emoji. Or is this just a lack of data issue in the least populous state?

Yeah, probably a job for De Moivre's equation. I heartily recommend this chapter on it, covers similar geographical effects: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf

Stability is a great way to counter this effect. If a county goes up and down the cancer rate chart then it's probably statistical noise. However, if it's steadily at the top every decade for 50 years that's likely to have an cause. Even if it's just an older than normal population.

Just finished reading this chapter - a really awesome recommendation, I'll probably buy the whole book. Thanks!

"You might have noticed that we cut the plot at 20 letters, but as with any behavior on the Internet, there is a long tail of laughter lengths. Our automatic regular expression parser gave up after trying to get through a haha over 600 letters long! Computers have a long way to go before they can truly understand the human condition. We weren't laughing that day."

The absence of usenet's "MTN" and "ROTFLMAO" made me wistful.

Curious that the violin plot is most smooth for the least used expression (lol)

Very funny. Hihi

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