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Comment by aloisdg | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but is there a name for this trend to put emoji everywhere? I have some trouble to read like that. There is a kind of Madeleine de Proust though, it feel like children book: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2...

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Slightly contrary to other commenters, but I like this trend (in web writing/Twitter etc.). A well placed emoji can convey an emotional state or complex concept that would otherwise take an extra sentence to convey.

Of course it depends on skillful execution.

I don't know if there's a term for it - but I was under the impression it's sole purpose was for marketers to create content that read/felt like it was written by "your friend". Lays on some heavy cringe-worthy "fellow kids" type of vibes.

I'd include it with the general infantilization of culture that has been going on for at least 20 years. It's not a coincidence that it reminds you of a children's book...

I thought that was interesting. Also, using the down arrow on my keyboard to scroll a paragraph at a time was interesting.

I think it's a marketing trend. The emojis seem like a soft universal language to help people who don't speak English grok broken google translations.

Hoping to hear the name for this trend as it's a very interesting one indeed. Done well it seems like this is definitely the new wave as we continue to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Done poorly, well I've done this and will just tell you the results are about as bad as you'd expect.

The language component hasn’t occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn’t helping much, so we resorted to a combination of screenshots, boxes, arrows, and emojis and it ended well :)

However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non-english speaker.

In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion.

Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.

Tbh, the animal concepts here might work - not universally, but for people familiar with Aesop's fables (Turtle and Hare?), as the animals seem to carry the usual Western traits.

And the more specific those meanings get, the more divorced they become from the way a new observer interprets the plain symbol.

Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel.

Wow, thanks for that trip down memory lane!

For anyone else who needs a reminder, have a read: https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adr...

Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said - I think it makes sense.

I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right.

With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.

Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ︵ ┻━┻

They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence.

The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.

I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji

I don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)

I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression.

Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it.

And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear

This could be the great vowel shift of our era. In 100 years we might have dedicated phonemes for emoji, making a terse language similar to Chinese. Or as smartphones become ubiquitous and children are exposed to these graphemes earlier and earlier, we might skip vocalization altogether and just beam pictograms directly to the visual cortex via AR.

exciting times!

The idea that emojis will replace actual language reminds of Newspeak from 1984. A few hundred (or thousand) smiley faces can't replace the complexity of human emotions.

I rather think that some emotions are best expressed as emoji. Emotions are a lot more linked to images than written characters.

I mean, how do you exactly express the nuances of ಠ_ಠ

Emojis are just awful, because people assume that they convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible. You basically need a set of Rosetta Stones to decipher what the emojis in Twitter profiles are supposed to convey, and you have to first determine which culture you are looking at. Does the pine tree emoji mean weed, or does it mean perennial? Or the grandmother that sends around eggplant emojis when she is talking about parmigiana, completely oblivious to its other meanings...

> people assume that [emojis] convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible

The same thing could be said about words.

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