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Comment by duncanawoods | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be more about how emojis have invaded products.

I recognise their communication value but they are aesthetic disasters (colour, dated cartoon style, cacophony) and they are real lowest common denominator expressions - often the equivalent of a fart noise or a “+1”. To support emoji you hand over a huge slice of product aesthetic and expressivity to something which in all essentials, is very childish.

I looked at reddit recently and all the emoji awards that can even apply background animations like flames gave me the strong impression that “this is not for adults”. For something smaller that might be a fine choice but reddit’s opportunity seems to be much larger as the pre-eminent threaded discussion site across all demographics and if anything I suspect longer form discussion skews older.

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Emoji are a native part of the vocabulary of a couple generations now. What you might be noticing is a platform signaling that it's supporting those folks as well.

Every Millennial is an adult, as are many Gen Z'ers, and these plus the first all-21st century generation are going to have come to expect emoji to exist and existed in digital spaces where emoji are a part of the jargon.

Why would it make sense for Reddit to force these people to communicate less completely than they are used to doing?

I think it goes back a lot longer than that - humans have been using symbols to express feelings for thousands of years. Written language is really the child of that. Personally I think humans will always communicate via little pictogram symbols, regardless of how perfect written communication with words is. There is something very innate about two eyes and an upward curved line meaning happy - and lots of similar examples. Emojis are just a form of this.

True but I don’t think any pictogram language has ever been as ugly as emoji. It’s the “programmer art” of pictograms. Brushes and carving seem to be helpful design constraints to drive restraint, regularity and simplicity.

I fully acknowledge they are part of language now and it’s a much harder decision to not support them, my point relating to the topic is that they aren’t simply new words, or an interaction pattern or a ligature but kawaii design elements that are very viral - driving further spread of poop emoji aesthetic.

I hope that they continue to evolve into typefaces that allow for more elegant design decisions.

There is a lot of value in the emoji concept if we could separate from their design. For example, I created a reasoning tool prototype driven by emoji - it was just so ugly I had to burn it with fire. It was also inconsistent across platforms.

I agree - emojis often add emotional metadata to sentence. Often times it could be communicated with words but emojis are easier so naturally people are going to use them.

In theory perhaps. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people typing LOL or laugh w/ tears emoji without so much as a grin, let alone a 'laugh out loud'.

“this is not for adults”

Sometimes I feel like adulthood is a social performance that people just aren't that into these days.

I mean, sure, there's biological adulthood, which is a bit more well-defined, but in the usual sense of the word, as a collection of tastes, behaviours, modes of expresssion, etc., perhaps it's just going out of style.

In my mind, adult taste is not just fashion but integrates judgement of quality and function. The adult has specific goals which are often benefited by greater order and less noise. A child doesn't share those goals. Their focus is play and seek pure stimulation and delight in noise.

It's probably true that adulthood is increasingly playful which feeds into tricky questions about whether this is infantalisation or something more positive like increased authenticity now that we are freed from arbitrary constraints of decorum such as dress-codes, rigid hours, cap doffing etc.

This reminds me what was happening in forums in "internet forums era". At some point in most of them users could make their own footer, so many users put there various "badges" from ones stating that they are proud vim users to what graphics card and power supply they have in their PC. Most of the time it was actually more content than post itself. Add to this animated emoticons and it was actually harder to read and focus on content which kind of defeats the purpose of internet forums.

One of the two big reasons I find places like HN or Reddit much better for discussing things than old phpBB-style forums. The other, biggest one being tree-structured threads instead of flat lists.

I'm first to customize stuff for myself, but I've grown to believe that public-facing customization is best left severely limited when dealing with general audience.

One disadvantage of the minimal customization approach is the difficulty of knowing who is posting what at a glance. Avatars seem to help me a lot on this. Here at HN I've had to make an effort to read the usernames, which are in a grey font smaller than the main text. This makes it harder to differentiate between people. In the past, I've replied to comments here not realizing who I was replying to. On a phpBB-style forum, if I find that I'm repeatedly replying to someone then I'm likely to pay closer attention to that person and maybe even become friends with them. To me, one of the values of a forum is building relationships, and if people are less distinguishable then this becomes more difficult.

I first realized this after this recent HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151

I agree that too much customization brings the focus on irrelevancies, but no customization (beyond a username) isn't right either. One compromise would be to allow avatars of a certain size but nothing else (signatures, flairs, etc.), but this becomes difficult with threaded comments. Lobsters has tiny avatars but they seem too unobtrusive.

Relatedly, StackExchange has randomly generated avatars, presumably to get around the problem of some people not customizing, but they aren't memorable.

That's a really good point. I've learned over the years to pay attention to and remember HN handles, but it's nowhere near as easy as it's with avatars on forums. Text nicknames don't hash as well as images.

I don't know what would be an improvement for HN. Adding images would ruin the aesthetics and make it worse for people with bad connections (of which we have surprisingly many here; the other day some people were reporting they're browsing HN from the middle of the sea!).

Wrt. customization on forums, I always found avatars to be constrained enough. Signatures were where problems started, because while usually limited in character length, with bbcode/HTML/image embeds, they were of unbounded size - and like GP mentions, often much larger than the comments themselves.

I like the HN aesthetic and wasn't making recommendations for HN per se. I think threaded comments seem to conflict with avatars. There might be a way to have something like avatars that's inherently lightweight, not requiring some people to disable avatars like you can do at some forums. SVG avatars come to mind but would probably be accessible only to a small number of people. Emojis might work but I don't like them.

Incidentally, the non-standard capitalization on your username has drawn my eye before, so your username is more recognizable and memorable as-is. I frequently enjoy your posts.

What about to auto-generate tiny profile image(like GitHub) by HN username?

I've never found those memorable. On the GitHub project I've contributed most to I can vaguely recall who has and does not have a user-specified avatar and what that looks like, but I can not recall any details of the auto-generated avatars for other people.

Sorry, this post was unclear: I can recall who has a user-specified avatar and roughly what that looks like, but for those who don't have a user-specified avatar, I don't have any recollection of what the automatically generated avatar looks like.

Yeah, automated avatars to me look like they're perfectly optimized to be as unmemorable as possible. They have no distinguishing features, there's literally nothing in them that my brain could latch onto.

At this point, if I had to design automated avatars for some board, I'd probably download a bunch of these silly Machine Learning image sets with 10 000 images of frogs, or something, scale every picture down to 64x64 or 128x128, and assign one to every user at random, or based on a hash of their username. I'm pretty sure this scheme would yield avatars that have all the benefits of autogenerated ones, and are also infinitely more memorable.

Yup - also makes me think of a parallel with medieval illuminated scripts. We could print all books today with trees growing in the margin or whatever but we don’t because a pleasant reading experience depends more on simplicity and quality of the basics (typeface, typesetting, print and paper) rather than ornamentation.

> “this is not for adults”

That’s a critical feature.

I really wish emoji were monochromatic like the rest of the text. GNU unifont is like this but I don’t think most people like that.

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