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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

The full stop thing has been around since IRC networks, or I imagine any quick-response short message platform. No one ever explicitly explains it or notes it, you just pick up on it.

Same with the difference colours of laughter "lol, rofl, haha, hahaha, lmao, ha." They're all just laughing but I bet you had different ideas about how each of them feel. This happens with language at large, synonymous words pick up nuanced differences so that we can express ourselves better, they aren't codified they just spread naturally.

I think for full stops, it's like the difference between familiar language and polite language. If you are too polite with a close friend you give off the impression that you're not close enough for casual language, which can be insulting.

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Logged in to say the same; all of these have ultimately formed back in IRC days and have aged remarkably well since

The only one that is new (and therefore annoying to me as an Old Internet Man) is the insistance of adding emojis into every sentence

For a while I could guess someones approximate age because of it, but now some of my 40+ friends have started emojiing like a 14 year olds too

Emojis are a more granular and expressive form of the more traditional lol, rofl, haha, :), :(. They’re a useful side channel for expressing tone.

That isn't a feature though. As it means and renders completely different in different contexts and apps.

They're really not though, because they render differently on different devices. If I send a gun emoji, it may render as a squirt gun for you for instance. Very different meanings.

Also the way I feel about certain emojis is different from how you feel about them and thus carry different (if slightly) meaning.

For example, I pretty much never use the clown emoji as I find it personally offensive. But I'm sure that pretty much everyone else doesn't feel the same about it.

The triumph emoji is a very good example of this.

Westerners use it to signify they're pissed while it actually means triumph in Asia I believe.

while true, many platforms like whatsapp use their own emojis so you know that it looks the same to everyone

They're a useful way to not take someone seriously.

It's been amusing to see the evolution of things like 'lol' in particular go from ubiquitous to very much frowned on and now back full circle to being a lot more common. I don't think "xD" and friends will come back though, especially with emojis.

I've not seen "xD" in a long time, but I do see "xd" used as a less-intense version of "xD".

Excuse me, my friends and I (but mostly I) use xD and variations extensively.

I actually stopped using it for a long time before unashamedly returning to it. It's just so easy compared to other shows of levity, AND it's scalable. xD is some levity. XDDDDDD is MORE levity. Like with :))))), except that's some psychotic boomer Russian shit. x3 adds a cuteness squee element to it. xP is more playful.

The absolutely annoying thing about emojis is that different platforms render them in different ways.

this doesn't really matter though, because you still now the meaning of the Emoji. Letters also render different, depending on the font, without their meaning changing

This is not true. The actual form has meaning too. Extreme example: if someone sends a romantic message, they typically don't want it rendered in a font typically used for the title on a horror DVD.

does that commonly happen though? emoji exist in unicode so meaning should remain consistent. in fact, here is how popular emoji render across platforms: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

It doesn't matter. Communication is often sensitive enough to not mess with it in any way. And there is no reason why emoji could not be transmitted without mutations (their size is negligible).

> I think for full stops, it's like the difference between familiar language and polite language. If you are too polite with a close friend you give off the impression that you're not close enough for casual language, which can be insulting.

But it's also great for dry humor over text. Like when you switch to corporate-speak as a joke between friends:

A: "Looks like our main factory just blew up"

B: "Yes. Given the prevailing macroeconomic conditions, I felt that downsizing that factory was critical to actioning the quarterly plan."

---

Or alternatively, when you're sending a flurry of messages and want to show that you're done with the thought:

A: "Looks like things are improving"

A: "Like, the RAM use just dropped by ~20%"

A: "the GC probably just finished."

I was a longtime user of IRC networks and never saw people care about conveying messages with a full stop or lack of it. That just never had any part of it.

I believe fullstop is from the telegram days.

It's from Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century BCE.

I knew it was older than texting:)

To close the loop on this, here is some greek texting! [1] :smiley:

[1] https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/texting-and-tweeting-in-...

:).

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