Hacker News Reader

Comment by Okkef | Hacker News Reader

The number of emojis in that text is appalling.

Hacker News: where we pine for expressive, DIY web of the 90s/00s but pour scorn on anyone adding character to their projects today.

Emoji copypastas are old and hardly original anymore.

I'm okay with expressive but all the emojis made it a little hard to read. Maybe don't inject them into the middle of phrases.

Good use of emoji

> the Ubuntu MATE 19.10 interim release is our most actively used interim release to date! :champagne:

> Recognising that we’re on to a good thing, :thumbsup: we’ve repeated this trick

> Thank you! Thank you all for getting out there and making a difference! :green_heart:

Annoying use of emoji

> That was a hugely successful :tada: initiative

> with developers to highlight :flashlight: where attention was needed.

edit: apparently hacker news strips out emojis

The fact that they are rendered as text provides a good rule of thumb for when they are appropriate :

1. Can you read your sentence without reading the emoji text and it makes sense?

2. Can you read your sentence with the emoji text and it still makes sense (and it means the same thing, with emphasis added)?

If the answer to both questions is YES, then using the emoji is OK.

3. Can you easily differentiate your sentence from a teenagers instagram post?

I didn’t know teenagers on Instagram wrote in sentences.

Frankly I thought it was hieroglyphics.

it's the modern equivalent of blink and animated gifs everywhere on the page on personal websites of the 2000. In a few years this emoji abuse will be mocked by everybody.

At least we appear to be trending in the right direction.

I'd be okay with everybody starting the mocking now.

Every time I'm tempted to use an emoji I ask myself, "what would Herman Melville do?"

Someone gave that question a lot of thought: http://czyborra.com/unicode/emojidick.pdf

Emojis? I wish that was the problem. I really have an issue reading the article without focusing on how terrible the font is, it's like each word is punching my eyes.

It makes sense that they'd use the Ubuntu font, but at least for me it's terrible for reading. All the emoji were a problem though, and the bold typeface.

Is there a bookmarklet around that would remove them?

It's absurd, but absurd isn't automatically a bad choice. If it's intentionally making a loud point of "don't take this too seriously, this is not formal" I'm all about this. This as informal is silly. This as anti-formal is great.

My first instinct reading this comment was that you were being old and cranky. Get off my internet, young'ns!

Well, after clicking through to the article... I'm sorry for doubting you. This text almost could have been mistaken for an emoji copypasta.

Is this the HN equivalent of being a grammar nazi?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com