"update now to get access to :burrito: and :taco:! (also fix the following 12 CVEs that 90% of our userbase doesn't know about or read)"
In any case, this must be the most ridiculous carrot yet. :D
I’ve seen sentences sometimes where words are actually replaced with emojis... is this how some subset of people actually communicate online or that’s just for some effect of irony?
Text is a flattening of speech, and emojis can add some of those missing dimensions back -- and, like our IRL verbal cues, tics, and gestures, they can be hard to decode if you're not "in" on the game.
This article does that. Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically.
> To stay relevant in the age of social media you had to support emoji or you were in the .
EDIT: HN stripped the emoji. The end of that sentence was "or you were :skull: in the :droplet:", read as "or you were dead in the water".
Maybe not ironically, but doing that definitely adds informality - exactly the kind of out-of-band context that GP is talking about.
It’s an ingroup signal, indicating (by “correctly” using emoji) that you’re part of a specific subculture to the recipient. “Praying_emojii flame_emojii YASS” indicates to me that the writer is young and hip. “Do you want to have a BBQ bbq_emojii ?” says to me that the writer is older and less hip.
It can be hard to communicate tone through writing. Emojis allow one to instantly mark a piece of writing as informal/non-serious with minimal effort. This includes irony - “eggplant_emojii” is often a non-serious reply indicating that “I am jokingly acting like this this is sexual or attractive”
It’s a proxy for longer writing. “Thumbsup_emoji” is a substitute for some marginally harder to articulate feelings of “looks good / I like it”
Of course, there are many subcultures that use emoji in different ways and as proxies for other things as well. At a previous employer we’d often just send “taco_emoji?” to ask who was buying lunch. It’s the sort of thing that can be used/abused in many different ways.
My use of emoji in messaging applications is primarily limited to quick rebus-like reaction replies to meme images, a quick and dirty reaction to a message in slack expressing some vague emotional response, or making complicated fart-jokes with my partner that rely on a lot of out of band information.
(i also use IRC on the daily, and have been known to use emoji there too, so these communication forms are not disjoint)
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...
Emoji are just fonts, and with some search engine sleuthing, you can find an OG pistol emoji out there, pop open your system emoji font in an editor, and replace the water pistol with a pistol pistol.
Everyone else will still see the Nerfed version, of course.
†For some value of easy
"add a glyph to the emoji keyboard" is more precise.
Burrito: Taco:
edit No, it stripped those :'(.
It has a lot of follow on implications too.