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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

You don't need emojis for that. Just good ol' emoticons.

I recognize what you mean about the office memos due to trivial misunderstandings (particularly tone misunderstandings) escalating. In my experience, almost all of them are the cases of someone erring on the side of seriousness. Myself, I mitigate that up front by judicious use of two emoticons: ":)" and ";)". The very act of using either of them, independent of the choice and context, already marks the whole sentence/paragraph/conversation as friendly.

Adding trees and rocketships and popcorns? Especially to either replace the exact word, or put it next to that word? What's the point?

(Ok, I'll admit I found two other emojis useful at work: thumbs-up and facepalm.)

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I think it goes beyond defusing seriousness.

Setting a surprised pikachu icon conveys way more meaning than anything I can think of in ascii form. All the Slack workspace I’ve seen had specific custom images that helped bring nuances in discussions that went a long way to give an angle to interpret your thoughts.

Only to people who're in on it, who know what it means.

I'm young enough that I 'should' love emoji, Snapchat, etc. and certainly did love Pokemon (Blue & Yellow on Gameboy Colour), but I would have no idea what you meant by a 'surprised pikachu icon'.

I think using something that might not be understood (and the recipient being left to guess worse things than you do mean) is worse than nothing at all.

And what would you do in a spoken conversation then anyway? 'Hang on, I need to send you an emoji'?

I think we already do that with words anyway. If someone replies to you with something along the lines of “my sweet summer child”, “tu quoque” or “hey dawg…” you’ll need to know the context to get what they mean.

Verbally your voice tone will bring 1000% more context.

IMO the “you need to know it” part is exactly why it works on many levels, as unfriendly it can be to new people from outside. I would say that’s part of speaking idiomatically.

Most companies have a culture of weird acronyms and phrases that are totally meaningless outside the context of that culture. It's expected that you won't understand normal discourse for the first couple weeks. I think emoji-usage is a subset of this linguistic phenomenon.

At my company, we have thousands of emoji-reacts (including surprised-pikachu), that probably have widely-divergent meanings to their users. Some people have seen them outside of the company before, and use them / seek them out knowingly. Those that don't pick it up pretty quickly.

You're right that the meaning is better when you're "in on it", but I think you might be overrating how big of a deal it is to become "in on it", and underrating it's utility as a form of expression, especially emotional expression, in a medium that normally lacks visual expression / body language / intonation.

A rocketship emoji implies a launch, motion, starting something.

Writing "rocketship" instead, besides being lame, also doesn't convey the same meaning and emotion.

Yes, but I can't think of an example where a rocketship emoji would fit in a conversation (except for marketing language, which I consider to be hostile).

Emojis directly corresponding to emotions make more sense: a facepalm emoji expresses the same thing that an actual gesture would.

"I just got a job offer! "

Unless you've been hired as an astronaut, I fail to see how a rocketship emoji would communicate anything relevant. An exclamation mark (or more than one) is a time-honored way of expressing excitement.

Consider that you failing to see these things is a "you" thing, not a "people are doing it wrong" thing.

Emojis are part of today's written culture because they're so trivially included alongside things being written today. You are fighting a battle that has long ended: they're a feature of communication now. Just like older ASCII emojis, and various other even older nonstandard-standards of comms.

And replying with an exclamation mark, something I've done myself many times, is incredibly ambiguous and not the best example you could come up with here :)

Also, you're kinda talking past each other here in terms of emojis in a message vs emojis as reaction.

Literally nobody I communicate with uses emojis beyond emoticons that have been converted by the software into emojis.

What kind of people do you work with?

Are you, like probably 95% of us on this forum working in tech?

Edit: Yup, you're a techie. Hint: you live in a bubble.

I'm a consultant, I work with all kinds of people. The number one skill required is communication, and learning to communicate with new teams, new people, new companies. All of them have different ways to communicate. Many of them use emojis, not all, but I also work with lots of different countries.

I also do quite a bit of work in the gaming community which has its own custom emoji culture, a different beast altogether.

People communicate outside of work; a heart to a loved one, my dad using a car emoji in the family group chat to indicate he is driving home from work, a thumbs-up when someone in a friend group suggest going to a movie

“Signed a big client!”

“Things are looking up!”

“______ got a promotion to ___________!”

“Releasing our new version/marketing campaign/product tomorrow!”

Maybe I'm too old, but in all these cases, the exclamation mark is doing all of the job of expressing elation, and adding a rocketship icon would be redundant.

Is smiling when saying these things face-to-face redundant because the tone of your voice does all of the job of expressing elation?

You can't say these things in the right tone without smiling - the very act of smiling changes how you speak.

You’re getting warmer!

Ok, fair, I guess you're trying to bait me into admitting that emojis are a way of expressing fundamentally different shades of emotions that are possible with ASCII.

I suppose this may be right, some people may be already thinking in emojis, the way some of my generation learned to think in emoticons.

Are you under the impression that emojis "mean" the same for everyone? We kinda invented words to specify the meaning; emojis are a horrible step back.

If you need a better word, use a thesaurus.

Emoji: like Kanji, but without agreed upon semantic meaning or pronunciation!

Or, you could say, "agreed upon semantic meaning" is a work in progress.

Except Kanji and other logographic systems since the hieroglyphs don't actually picture a thing directly, so there's no confusion between what's the "agreed upon" meaning and what the image represents at face value.

That's a fair point I suppose. Kanji started as pictographic too. It's just really strange to me that anyone would choose to add such a complicated feature to language use that they didn't inherit from a time before syllabaries and alphabets.

> since the hieroglyphs don't actually picture a thing directly

Sometimes they do. 龍 is one of my favorites, and it originates as a picture of a dragon - body and legs on the right, head (立) and whiskers (月) on the left.

It's a shame that one got simplified.

> If you need a better word, use a thesaurus.

Again, with the arrogance and the implication that persons using emojis are dumb and/or uneducated.

Yes, images are ambiguous. Just as text is limited and constraining. There's a reason we say "a picture is worth one thousand words", and it's not because the creators of said quote didn't have a thesaurus at hand.

> "a picture is worth one thousand words"

That is such a terrible sentence, because it's barely ever true. Most pictures, without a context, are utterly meaningless; go check a Facebook stream where people just barf images without any context. None of them mean anything, let alone a thousand words.

Fun fact, one publisher AMA I read reported that a picture is literally worth one thousand words, ie.

(per word rate) * 1000 = estimated price of an illustration.

Of course pictures don't mean anything without context, but then, neither do words. It's much easier to understand a complicated layout with a map than with a description of all the possible exits, for example, and neither provides much information if you don't know what room/building is being described.

If you think words don't have this problem, you should read into Jacques Derrida's concept of différance. This may be more apparent in emojis since they're relatively newer.

I mean a more picture-like emoticon is more neutral in my opinion. And it can be supporting/cheering, e.g. when doing a complicated change or deployment. Probably there are better alternatives though. ;) can be interpreted as condescending, so I rather avoid that with work topics. :) Is generally friendly though, I think.

But you could write launch, motion, or start instead

But that's not as fun.

So does an emoji.

So does as emoji what? :-)

Not convey anything meaningful.

I've had a coworker use <grin> instead of smiley faces. I thought that was a pretty effective way to show emotions while still having a professional looking email.

Yes, back in my BBSing days, using <grin> or (more commonly) <g> was popular before smilies such as :) took off. And when they did, we just called them smilies, even frowny face ones, not emoticons.

Is your coworker Lee Dailey? He helped me out a couple times on /r/powershell and wrote that on both occasions.

Also useful:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or you could just use emoji like a normal person, and stop treating being stuck in the nineties as a virtue?

You could be more friendly :)

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