Your brain on emoji | Hacker News Reader

Your brain on emoji

nautil.us

104 pointsdnetesn175 comments

Emojis are used mostly in 2 ways: punctuating a sentence so that it’s tone is less ambiguous. A shortcut for an emotional state that is not dissimilar to writing “haha” “ew” or “meh”.

As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons and can’t possibly imagine a world where emojis didn't exist.

But I m surprised no one mentions the “!” or other stylistic tools like all caps. These are “contextual modifiers” for text that have existed for ages. Some languages do have sarcasm punctuation and possibly small adverbs that annotate some kind of emotional state.

So basically yes, the article is right, emojis work mostly like words, but for me it’s just a continuation of what existed before (punctuation and onomatopoeia), and its extension and spread was made possible by the technology (an imposed vocabulary and convenient keyboard).

An article on this topic I like:

Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation

>"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on."

>"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh and passive-aggressive," said Juan Abenante Rincon, 24, a social media manager for Adidas. "Like, are you mad? What's going on? Like, did I do something wrong?"

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...

What level of neuroticism is this?

¨In other words, enough to send a chill down anyone's spine.¨

I say again, what level of neuroticism is this? If folks are reading that much into a standard element of grammar, then maybe the grammar isn't the problem.

¨Klin said the entire debate demonstrates that language is constantly changing — and that's OK.¨

Language exists to communicate ideas; if a change makes things harder to communicate, it's a bad change. Change isn't inherently good.

If hundreds of millions of people are using grammar one way (and have been for a long time), and some young adults come along and _misread_ that grammar, the worse course is to tell the 100s of millions to change their behavior.

I have to agree with the parent that on an intuitive level a single-sentence text message ending in a period conveys something pretty strongly. It does a couple things to me: indicating finality, turning an informal comment into a formalized sentence, and just feeling unnecessary thus prompting analysis. furthermore from a grammar perspective most messages are not proper sentences e.g. "yup" or "on my way". In the end we have to adapt our writing to the context, and texting has much more tonal analysis put on fewer symbols —

People ending their sentences in ellipses are the true passive aggressive ones...

Single period is normal, surely.

I HATE ellipses and I really don't even understand the purpose. What are they supposed to signify? I know two people that use them constantly and it makes me feel like I said something dumb; like there is some response that is so obvious that I shouldn't have needed to say what I said. I know that isn't their intention, but that's just what my brain makes of the those three trailing periods...

> Single period is normal, surely.

This I understand. Ending a text with a period does make it seem more "serious". I would interpret "yup." to have an almost annoyed tone, and I think that's pretty common. I think it just comes from not needing to punctuate statements given that most texts are single sentences anyway. The end of the text implies the period, adding it implies more.

The purpose of the ellipsis is to punctuate sentence fragments, which, given that the typical Internet user couldn't tell you what a sentence fragment was if their life depended on it, explains why they're so frequently misused.

Interesting point about the period. I hadn't thought about it before and now I'll never be able to unsee it.

To me ellipses really just are the passive aggressive marker

> We can do that...

We can do that, but it really shouldn't be necessary, or it's a really dumb thing to do, or I really just don't want to, or you should just do it yourself.

There's always something negative implied that the author doesn't want to say outright.

Then you have people who obviously don't use it like that, which makes it absolutely impossible to interpret their texts. At least if you are conditioned to interpreting it that way.

Sometimes I use ellipses when I start out writing one sentence, but then decide I want to say something else instead, interrupting what I was initially going to write with something that contradicts it. I suppose this is kind of silly, because, with writing, I can of course just, delete the initial sentence entirely...

... but, idk, it is often easier for me to write largely as if I am speaking? Where much of the punctuation plays the role of indicating inflection/intonation (I'm not sure what the difference is between those two), and pauses, etc., rather than what they are "supposed to" stand for. For example, the question mark at the end of the above sentence does not indicate that the sentence is a question, but that I want it to be read with the inflection that a question would have.

But maybe that is just laziness on my part. Of course, I know not to do this in formal communications. But, perhaps I should still refrain from being lazy in this way even when writing pseudonymous comments on the internet (and if writing it "properly" would make it not worth it to me to write the commend, than simply not write the comment).

> As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons

Username checks out!

(And I completely agree with your last point ^_^)

commonly also used as tags on forum posts

I'm starting to find them emotionally manipulative in a bad way. FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser.

Especially when I'm using BrowserTamer[1] to intercept all URL launches so I can feed a few work URLs to Edge and Chrome, and FireFox as the default for everything else, so it effectively is my default browser. It's not the only piece of software behaving somewhat like that, either.

[1] https://www.aloneguid.uk/projects/bt

I recently encountered a payment app at a restaurant that had a slider for adjusting the tip. There was a smiley face above the slider and it cried unless you set the tip to over 10%.

(While usually expected, it's not socially mandatory to give out tips in my country.)

I wonder if this kind of thing actually pays off, or if it backfires more often. I know for me, whenever I see some emotional manipulation like this it makes the choice easy (not that I was ever going to tip into a computer instead of cash in the first place.)

That's not emojis being emotionall manipulative - that's Firefox being poor copywriters

>FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser.

The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you.

Also - what about iPhones stubbornly showing green texts from Android messagers? That's not even "I'm sad you're using Android." It's more a passive-aggressive "I'm going to degrade your experience because your friend uses Android." Forget about emojis- Apple is weaponizing colors!

> The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you.

Firefox is not a person, why should it have "preferences"? It's a tool. Tools should be used because they're useful, not because they "prefer to be used."

It could be argued that the user above chose to use Firefox. They chose to use this in their minds inferior tool or a tool with an undesirable feature. They made that decision.

> A bad workman always blames his tools –Old proverb

Is the argument here that developers should no longer test their sites in FF?

I'm arguing people can use whatever they want. No one is making anyone use the browser of their choice.

> The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you.

Because I'm a person and Firefox is a tool? How is it irony? Next time you're going to say Firefox can set my diet just like I can set its search engine?

The green bubble has nothing to do with with iPhone vs Android, it has to do with iMessage vs a regular text message. iMessages typically use data and text messages typically don’t. Furthermore, iMessages have greater features that obviously can’t be delivered to people who don’t use iMessage, like reactions and effects. iPhone users who use a different messaging app also have green bubbles, as do messages sent as a text message while off of data.

It has nothing to do with iPhone vs Android, it's just a symptom of Apple pushing people into using an iPhone-only messaging app which they refuse to port to Android, specifically to create vendor lockin! Totally different!

I actually get green text bubbles from a relative with an iPhone because they send messages to my work number whereas my iMessage is tied to my personal number.

I only get green bubbles, because pretty much everyone uses Discord or Facebook Messenger. The only messages I get that arrive through the Messages app are from Android users, usually via Android Auto, or automated notifications.

By far the majority of my text messaging happens in WhatsApp these days.

yes this. green messages imply the person has poor internet reception e.g. when out of town or during heavy storms

To be fair, the blue/green thing is kinda useful, I don't use a ton of apple-ecosystem exclusive things but it's nice to tell when I can or not.

I mean iPhones do it purposely to make people buy iPhones. And it works.

Apple is full of marketing geniuses. They’re maybe using a lot of dark patterns but they’re raking in profit.

iMessage itself is a feature that makes people want to buy iPhones (maybe). The colour of the text bubble is not.

Ask a teenage girl whether she would want an iPhone just for the color of the bubbles when she texts her friends

What's emotionally manipulative about "should"?

... what's degrading about green?

Look at the re-sale market for used iPhones. Youth do not want to be caught dead with Android phones.

The claim was that Apple is giving someone a degraded experience. How is "Android user doesn't like their Android phone" evidence of a degraded experience for an iPhone user?

The reason why kids in USA don’t want Android isn’t the phones themselves but the way their messages get presented by Apple’s software. No teenager wants to be flagged as poor to their peers by a bright green bubble.

Imagine if Microsoft had done this 20+ years ago when they were on top. All emails sent from a Mac would be displayed in magenta Comic Sans when opened on Windows. Wouldn’t that have been a blatantly anticompetitive move to make Macs look worse to business users?

But green isn't the equivalent to goofy conic sans, it's just a color. People in Europe use WhatsApp and it's green.

The problem is that money based status competition is so rampant in America and this is merely an effect of it.

I understand, but that is a different discussion. "Alice doesn't want to appear poor to Bob" != "a degraded experience for Bob". If Microsoft had displayed emails in magenta Comic Sans they would have been harder to read, and thus a worse experience for the recipient, manipulative but still not emotionally manipulative - compare, say you install Linux on your former Windows PC and Microsoft change the boot loader to a war photo of a crying child being torn from her crying parents by an enemy solider and the text "I'll miss you so much".

Young iPhone users genuinely complain that the green bubble is searingly bright and ugly compared to the iMessage blue which is darker and less saturated.

I know the whole thing is kind of silly. But it clearly does have a surprisingly strong effect on people’s perceptions. And Apple has some history of deliberately rendering competing products as ugly (Mac OS X used to show Windows network shares with a grim icon of a beige CRT monitor).

There are supposedly psychological effects in using green at all, and there is also a known controversy over green bubble used on iOS bundled Messages app[1][2]. As for "should", not sure about that...

1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

2: https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-...

green to me = unencrypted and getting stored directly into a government database forever

How can American authors write text that says Microsoft introduced... then a word like "Emoji" that is so obviously Japanese Authors still see the world through a lens, that until its big in US, it does not really exist, and then associate it to the US company that copied it first.

I'm guessing the author is refereing to emoticons from MSN Messenger. I don't think the term "emoji" gained popularity in the west until the iPhone came out, and made emoji wildly popular because of the one secret trick you had to do to enable the keyboard on non-Japanese phones.

Also emojis are a derivative of emoticons (or smileys, as they were called if you went far enough back): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Emoji means pictograph in japanese. I think it's fair to say that Americans "coined" the term as a name word for the characters where as the japanese were simply describing the characters literally.

I'm surprised to see the spread of emoji attributed to Microsoft in the initial sentences. It's possible that the author may be referring to the smiley faces in extended character pages, or maybe Webdings, but I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically, which I believe to have been petitioned by Google and popularized by Apple.

Interesting article either way.

Because it's wrong.

Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji")

Even "emoticons"¹, or pictographs replacing some text like ":-)" (which is how they were called before the west imported "emoji", largely because it showed up in phone IMEs after its inclusion in Unicode) were definitely a thing in the late 90s. I suspect AIM must have had them before Messenger, but frankly, I didn't think anyone actually used Messenger except maybe business types?

Everyone I seemed to know was on AIM, with a few odd exceptions on Yahoo, if they were normal. If they were more nerdy, IRC, but that was text based. (Though some clients would still translate certain text sequences into pictures. I'm pretty sure, e.g., Trillian could/would, but I don't remember when I adopted it. But it could have been earlier than 2003.)

¹The picture version. As I recall the usage of this word in the late 90s/early '00s, it could mean either ":-)" as text, or the pictogram version thereof, largely because clients at the time would just convert between the two freely. One end might send text, but the receiving client would pictogram it.

On chat applications: In Finland no one used AIM and everyone used messenger.

I suspect this was the norm also elsewhere in Europe. I am talking about Messenger 4.6 that came built in with windows xp and its later versions, not the business version.

The most popular choice in Germany used to be ICQ, at least based on my own friend group and various conversations I've had over the years.

In the Netherlands, MSN Messenger (commonly abbreviated just 'MSN') was essentially a monopoly, although at that time it was only used by young people (older people still just called each other on the phone).

With the rise of smartphones though, it ended up being supplanted by WhatsApp, with the ill-conceived migration to Skype killing off most of the last stragglers.

> Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones,

Emoji as originally created/used in Japan were not Unicode, Unicode emoji only came many years later, so referring to non-unicode emoji as emoji isn't improper and doesn't dilute the term.

But the MSN Messenger emoticons from Microsoft were not those Japanese emoji. That term was only popularized with the iPhone.

I didn't say they were, I didn't say anything about MSN messenger. What I said is that Japanese emoji were not originally implemented with Unicode, therefore non-Unicode emoji are not improper or diluted emoji. Emoji does not imply Unicode, Unicode is just an implementation detail of modern emoji, it isn't and never was a defining attribute of emoji; for the first several years of emoji's existence in Japan, Unicode wasn't involved.

I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK.

Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.

The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.

Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts.

See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html

They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.

Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan.

Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively.

MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.

I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996

Web forums like UBB already had what we called "smilies" in 1998 with graphical emotive faces you could include in your posts, so that concept of image emotes predates the Japanese emoji.

Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what they call "custom emoji" which hijacks the term and takes us back to 1998 web forums again.

> Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

That's not quite right. The Unicode emoji we use today are directly descendant from the emoji that were on Japanese phones.

That's how emoji ended up on our keyboard: Apple added them to the Japanese iPhone keyboard to be compatible with Japanese carriers; users in the west discovered this and started enabling Japanese input on their phones to use them; finally they became so popular that Apple (and Samsung etc.) also enabled them for non-Japanese keyboards.

If not for the original Japanese emoji, chances are that every website would still have their own smileys, instead of there being a single, interoperable set.

That's the point I was clumsily trying to make.

But now that "custom emoji" on sites like Slack and Mastodon are a thing, the term "emoji" is losing it's meaning and reverting to meaning the same thing we had before.

You’re repeating the word “emote”, but “emoji” has no etymological connection to “emote” or “emotion”, it just means “picture character” in Japanese.

i strongly suspect that the reason we call them "emojis" rather than "smilies" is due to the "emo" in "emoji". 100% of english speakers without any japanese knowledge associate the "emo" in "emoji" with "emotion"

I know that, but it's not relevant to the point. The whole article is talking about smiles and emotions conveyed in text, so that's the context.

The name doesn't matter. Forum smilies also had a bunch of non-faces/emotions (my favorite was the "stink lizard" - still not sure what that was supposed to convey) but they're not interesting to the discussion.

Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.

You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based.

Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.

Just for reference, the Japanese term for emoticons is kaomoji (“face characters”), distinct from emoji.

Image emoticons did exist (every 2000s IM app and social media site had them), but largely died off with the popularization of Japanese emoji.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

Yeah the original way to get emojis on iPhone was to go in and enable a keyboard hidden among the Japanese category of languages in settings. While apps existed that just basically gave directions for how to enable that.

MSN messenger had a ton of emojis and at the time (around 2000), in my experience, they were used on messenger a lot more than on AIM or ICQ. This is, of course, in the west.

As far as Unicode, the impetus for inclusion, while petitioned by Google, was at least officially due to enabling compatibility with Japanese phones where emoji were also quite popular.

Those were emoticons, they developed separately from the Japanese emoji that we use today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

They were a fixed set of pictures that you could put inline with the text in a message; despite the differing origin, I don't see the distinction.

The distinction is twofold:

1) The term ‘emoji’ came along with the Japanese emoji on the iPhone. Nobody at the time called MSN/forum emoticons ‘emoji’, so it’s a neologism to say that MSN had emoji.

2) Emoji are a fixed, standardized set that works the same way across the entire OS. 2000s emoticons were implemented separately on each app and website, with differing support and designs everywhere.

Some contemporary apps (like Slack and Discord) choose to override the system emoji style and provide their own shortcodes though, so I guess they are like a hybrid of emoji and traditional emoticons.

That first paragraph really put me off the article to be honest. Why read an article on emoji by someone who doesn't know what emoji are?

At the same time, I do realise "emoji" is now often being used as a generic term that encompasses both true emoji (unicode-based) and general emoticon images.

I've never heard emoticons referred to as emoji, mainly because people don't use emoticons anymore (unless they still post on forums). It seems like a deliberate editorial decision. I would prefer to preserve the distinction, however, for reasons GP stated.

I use emoticons when texting (because I'm a graybeard), but my phone translates them into emojis before sending. So I've just taken to calling them all emojis.

My beard might be even greyer because I still think of them as 'smileys' :)

It took me years to change the habit of calling them smileys!

Do you mean you use smileys like :) :( :P ?

Emotions were the little images you could place amongst text in MSN Messenger.

As far as I recall it was pretty common to call :-) etc emoticons back in the day. Like 1990s/early 2000s.

Emoticons were originally and predominately text based ¯\_(-_-)_/¯

The author does state the distinction between emoji and emoticons in the sixth paragraph.

> I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically

Platforms like Slack and Mastodon now let you add what they call "custom emoji" which back in a web forum in 1999 we would have called "smilies", but in any case are definitely not part of unicode.

The term has evolved to just mean any graphical smilies/small embedded images

e-moji should be attributed to NTT DoCoMo, who first had it on their feature phones in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

The article above also noted how MSN Messenger and BlackBerry adopted emoji from 2003 onwards.

MSN Messenger never adopted emoji, they had their own emoticons/smilies that were developed independently. There were no emoji in the west until the iPhone got it in 2011

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

I felt that it was on point to point out Microsoft, as it was the main area where I first started using emojis (before they were emojis, even though it was functionally the same). MSN Messenger came with a nice set of default smileys, and it was very simple to create your own smileys and use them in conversations with others. When other people sent a smiley to you, you could just right click it and add it to your own private repertoire of smileys.

I was a hold-out for quite a while, like the author, because they felt very twee. The one that convinced me though was the thumbs-up emoji, which can be an entire reply to an email or text, that says "I've read this, and we don't need to continue the conversation", with undertones of agreement or a thank-you. Somehow single-word replies like "Gotcha" or "Yes" felt too curt, and anything longer invited further discussion where I didn't want any. I don't really use any other emojis though - I love using language too much, and all of the others feel like I can express myself better through words.

Yet (and I'm sorry to generalise); Gen-Z "typically finds thumbs up emoji passive aggressive"

https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-...

First, NY Post? F them and the horse they rode in on. They stoke culture wars at every turn.

Second, even if it was true (which I doubt), there are some things which should be ignored and someone believing this nonsense should not be coddled.

I'm very liberal, but this is just pure nonsense.

It's used like that on Facebook a lot. You're welcome to your opinion on correct use and interpretation of emojis, but that doesn't stop others from using them the way they feel is appropriate.

Idk that's how I interpret the thumbs up after I say something. In my mind it's comes off like a dismissive "that's cool". Like what ever I said isn't worthy of a text response. Idk it's a little odd to explain I guess

I think it means something very different in a work slack thread than a text chat with friends.

In a work context, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want to briefly communicate ‘go ahead you have my approval’ and not mean anything snarky by it. Yet if I’m messaging with my friends and they ask about going for drinks Saturday, and I say ‘go ahead, you have my approval’, that’s going to come off as pretty passive aggressive too.

:thumbsup:

I've found that different subcultures can apply very different connotations to emojis (as well as other communications things). I think it's a fool's errand to try to find a usage that carries the same subtext for all subcultures.

This is largely a "know your audience" sort of thing. My approach is to just write like I normally do when I don't know the peculiarities of the specific people I'm talking with. In general, they will know you aren't "on the inside" and will understand that you don't know what the various connotations are. Even if they'll mock you for it later amongst themselves.

This is context sensitive. As in spoken conversation, if your buddy comes up and shares a cool story with you, silently responding with a thumbs up would be rude. If you're coordinating with a team, a thumbs up is a respectful and commonly understood gesture to indicate that you approve/understand.

Very much so - you need to be careful using things like 'facepunch' (which is a very weird name for the fistbump emoji) or the pray/thanks/hi-five emoji.

I think I'd rather be perceived old than follow Gen Z's weird rules, if that article is to be believed. I will keep my slight smiley thank you very much

Young people trolling journalists who ask them stupid questions is a long-standing tradition that Gen Z has not abandoned.

AFAICT, the entire "Gen Z finds thumbs up passive aggressive" is fake news; it got started somewhere, and then copy/pasted across news sites with nobody doing an ounce of journalistic fact checking. E.g., this chain [1] → [2] → [3] chains back to the Reddit post ([3]) which has a grand total of … 26 upvotes (on the day the Today article is written)? … and AFAICT, the reddit post is what kicks off the news copypastafest. That's not a reliable source to then label an entire generation. "Journalists" getting their "facts" from r/Adulting … sigh. (Note that your NYPost article falls, chronologically, between [1] and [2], and note the dates on them all. There's a few other citations in the Today post … like an employee at Today, tweets, (it must have been a rather slow week) … and a (different) NYPost article whose citation is … the same Reddit post! The closet we get is then a jump to a Yahoo article which claims an unsourced survey for its data.)

(AFAICT talking to people, everyone I've seen who thinks this is a thing appears to think such because they've encountered these news posts / reposts of this, not because they genuinely hold the belief themselves. Self-fulfilling prophecy, at this point. Though now that I've invoked a weird form of Cunningham's Law, I'm sure someone will tell me they're the one, and that there are dozens of them out there. Tell me why you can't just read :+1: in an "assume best intent" light and treat it as the literal "ack/agree/yes" that it's probably meant as, and what, you want me to spam everyone with reply notifications instead of just a reaction…?)

(There is also an episode of Dr. Phil out there that goes into how a bunch of emoji are supposedly poisoned one way or another, again with nary a citation to most of it, or they're saying "X emoji is ruined" where, no, it's only ruined if you use it in a particular context where the meaning of the emoji isn't the original meaning, but rather the context puns it to something else. Cf. the eggplant emoji.)

[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/28/gen-z-thumbs-up-...

[2]: https://www.today.com/news/news/thumbs-up-emoji-debate-rcna5...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221013050626/https://www.reddi...

Also, in slack an emoji response doesn't need to be cleared (so it doesn't count toward a notification count). That is what got me on board.

Which leads to me asking a question and never getting a notification of an answer, because some idiot just thumbs-upped the question.

Also, thumbs-upping the question, what does that even mean? It's a good question? I also have this question? The answer is yes? What if it wasn't a yes/no question?

o_O

I agree, that's unhelpful. Honestly, never seen that happen in my years of slack use.

And if you send a message that's only +<emoji>, slack will use it as a reaction on the immediately preceding message

I do wish Slack would "target" the last message the moment one types the "+" though. There's a TOCTOU bug of sorts with the current setup where someone can ninja a reaction out from under you. Easily correctable … but can be momentarily confusing or comedic, depending on how much common sense the other end has.

Ok, this could trim some valuable time from my work day, thanks! Although I guess that could be risky in multi-person chats...

I did not know that. Thanks.

Yeah me and my coworkers make heavy use to the thumbs up as a “got it/acknowledged”, because we work in ag driving in and out of cell range, so it lets the sender know the herd of cats got their message and will be acted upon, instead of fucking radio silence or a gish gallop of unwanted text.

I find the thumbs-up emoji to be too ambiguous, because visually it can mean either an approval or an encouragement, but it’s often used just as an acknowledgment. However I’d like to express an acknowledgment without implying an approval.

Besides, as the sibling notes, it can be slightly negative, because a mere thumbs-up means that you didn’t find it worth to bother typing some actual text.

I've always been afraid of using thumbs up because I've heard in some cultures as a gesture it means "up yours", although I suppose at this point almost everyone realizes what it means in a global/digital sense.

I like the eyes emoji for "seen it" or "looking into it" and the thumbs up for agreement

I was also a holdout until I saw emojis described as "body language for text". That helps contextualize them and let me appreciate them. They let you add so much nuance and personality to text. In a world of async communication, they can be crucial signifiers of intent.

Unless you're specifically trained for that, it's very hard to fake body language and facial expression. That's the whole point to it.

And it doesn't apply to emoji.

I was just about to write this. Emoji not only takes the place of body language and facial expressions over a textual medium, but gifs and other pictograms are a whole linguistic and almost hieroglyphic medium of shared cultural communication.

This link in the article about the history of the :-) emoticon -- proposed by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon on September 19, 1982 -- is really fascinating:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

I quit using emoji entirely almost 5 years ago, though I do continue to use a few simple emoticons. https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/104722329811389645...

My reasons: "There's a method to my madness. You see, gifs are trivially infinitely extensible and backward compatible. Whereas each new emoji requires an addition to Unicode and software updates. And the demand for more emoji is insatiable. That system is not practical or scalable." (I mentioned gifs there because I was known to frequently post gifs.) https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/105276966084695244...

I think the big difference between gif and emoji is that you need to see a gif to know what it represents.

You mean in terms of accessibility? The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text.

Apparently emoji aren't the greatest for accessibility: https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/

It may be even worse for emoticons, so that's a legitimate criticism: https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-...

> The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text.

The bad news is that X's gifs' alt text is absolute trash most of the time. Stuff like "office stare gif" etc.

What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs.

To understand a meaning of a word/emoji/gif you have to see it in context several times or look up a definition. (with emojis and gifs there is additional problem in lack of dictionaries for them). When amount of words in a language is finite or they are extending slowly (emoji) I ma able to keep up with thier meanings as opposed to gifs and memes. Which are evolving to quickly for me to keep up.

> What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs.

What I mean by lack of scalability is that there is insatiable demand for new emoji but only finite Unicode code space for them.

This is has even become a social/political problem, because everyone insists on equal "representation" in emoji in terms of skin color, gender, etc. We couldn't just stop at Simpsons-style yellow faces.

They make sense as reactions but are absolutely awful in prose. Emoji spam (specially rocket) is the litmus test for “people i dont want to work with”

Similarly, any email with an emoji in the subject line is an email I'm not going to read

EDIT - guilty party in my inbox today is Newegg, twice. I should unsubscribe from those.

One-character reactions are the only acceptable use of emoji.

(I also judge anyone who stresses the second syllable of 'emoji', which is basically everyone.)

Emojis in written text can lose their meaning in translation. Your intended meaning may not be what your audience understands, but I guess that’s inherent in most communication.

I had a bunch of russian coworkers once, and one of them would constantly type “)))” any time I asked him a question. I thought it was some weird cyrillic keyboard quirk and never paid it any mind, until I learned it’s the approximate russian equivalent for “lol.”

Didn’t know what to make of him after that. I guess he thought I was a moron.

":" is cumbersome to type in on a Russian keyboard, so just ")" is used. Back in IRC days it would look like

`vlad: )`

Yeah, )) is fairly common in Russia and neighboring countries such as Belarus or Armenia.

Another one I encountered at work was a Taiwanese coworker ending sentences with a ~ character which apparently indicates "cute" / "playful"

))) is just a beaming smile... derived from :) but without the eyes. Not exclusively Russian

Separately, I remember years ago doing social media competitive audits and someone saw >>>>>> in there and thought it was errant text. E.g. "Taco Bell >>>>>>>". Of course what it means is Taco Bell is better than everything

Kinda adds a whole new layer to the drone metal band sunnO)))

I would interpret it as "leaving for Taco Bell"

Git conflict emoji.

Russians do that. The first time I noticed it was in Counter-Strike. They would type ))) and the messages would look like this:

Vladimir : )))

So I thought that they "reused" the colon that separated the name from the message. That was my theory at least...

I think the biggest issue with (modern, unicode) emoji has been the different art used between OS/platform. It seems like everyone is kind of converging on making their emojis convey the same emotion as Apple's (which is probably the right move since Apple popularized them, and they're baked into a ton of images that have been circulating for years)

Samsung had some rough emojis for a while. Look at their old "grimacing" face. Or the old cookies emoji that they made saltine crackers. Or their eye roll emoji which was a sarcastic eye roll on Apple, but Samsung had it as a cute smile. I'm sure that caused many a communication issue.

> It turns out that a world freshly speckled with [emoji smile] is not really such a changed world after all.

I've recently discovered there is a generational gap in smiley usage :)

If you are younger, my ":)" above can be taken more as a condescending smirk that puts down the reader. If you are older, it is just a smile and signifies that I'm, well, what a smile usually means: I'm being friendly, happy, non-threatening.

I apparently now have to watch how I use smileys because younger people have started interpreting the symbol, imho, incorrectly :(

(I am unaware if a similar proviso extends to the sad face above)

Actually even on IRC in the 90's, sometimes :) was sarcastic, really depended on context anyways. 5% chance of sarcasm.

Internet is a highly sarcastic world so it's not a surprise that people eventually perceive it to be more sarcastic than it should be I suppose.

You can just add a - to make it unambiguous. :-)

Or a caret if you want to make it unambiguous in the other direction.

It's funny the way language is evolving; even things like how you use punctuation and capitalization now has meaning.

Like 20 years ago, if I was sending an IM or something, I would always just write like I'm writing here. But now, if I'm sending someone a text or slack or something, I always feel like it's more casual/less try hard if it's lowercase with relaxed punctuation. (That's just my style, I don't expect others to match). If I end a text with a period and everything properly capitalized, I almost feel like I'm being too formal. (Admittedly, some people probably just think I'm sloppy and lazy!) I never got into writing "u" or "ur" though. For some reason those still bug me.

I know a lot of people don't like memes or gifs, but actually, I think they're great. Sometimes it's much more effective to express a sentiment with an image instead of a word or phrase.

I always feel a little cringe when I end a sentence in lol, like I'm laughing at my own joke, although sometimes it helps to soften something I'm saying.

ASL has some casual register signs that are simplified or single hand versions of complex signs [1] that only came about from people chatting more casually. The original version goes from being the only word, to being the formal word for that idea.

I think humans just tend towards registers of communication, regardless of the medium.

[1] https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson27.htm

I’m starting to think that Hacker News is on the wrong side of history on this one. Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. Emoji are becoming a permanent part of written language.

I don’t want to see a post full of emoji either, but perhaps a filter that allows one emoji per 20 words would work. Perhaps using a font with black line or grayscale emoji?

> Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts.

For me at least, seeing emoji makes me even more uncertain about the meaning of the message.

This is why I love Google's Noto Emoji font: https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/what-is-black-and-...

It's not an emotional channel, at least not purely. And you can express that very well in text, too. You just need to cut the irony and sarcasm. For the (rather dumb and contrived) examples from the article

* Unfortunately, her cake she was terrible.

* Her cake was such a failure, I had to laugh.

* She made a nice cake.

I don't hate emoji (any more -- the article also describes my own experiences warming up to them).

I'd hate to see them on HN though. :(

You can use emoticons or kaomoji perfectly fine if you want. ^_–

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Does anymore understand "the cake she made was terrible ;)" as ironic? To me the 3 sentences have all the same meaning, the emoji would just represent the way the person feels about it now. And perhaps with the ;), it could mean that they talked about how the person is a terrible cook before.

I don't like the overly cute emoticon "fonts" that some messengers use. Away into the night with those super smug looking apple cheeked smilies.

Did you know ? Eastern europeans end words (without space) with singles characters "(" and ")" to indicate full smileys. Only themselves understand each others and they dont tell anyone about it)))

From my old WoW-playing days, I was given to understand that : was awkward to reach on cyrillic keyboards, so many of the russians skipped it and just used ) or even %) sometimes (which sort of looks like eyes and a nose if you squint)

Why eastern europeans in particular? Is it somehow related to slavic languages? Now I'm curious

It's the Russian keyboard layout that makes ":" difficult to type.

In Poland we just use the US keyboard layout so that's not a problem. I assume it's similar for other non-cyrillic slavic languages.

Weird, I've seen poles do that

I'm guessing they are overgeneralizing since I'm a Bulgarian and I haven't really seen anyone do that.

I also thought it was an Eastern European thing. Would be nice to see a map of prevalence of this trend.

Yeah sorry I meant far-eastern europeans

I don't know where I read it, but apparently older people use emojis to feel 'with it' and cool, whereas the younger crowd barely use them. (I could be wrong, and I have no source, so don't quote me on this).

Also emojis are yet another data point to do things like sentiment analysis, and have been weaponized by social media companies to target more relevant ADs at you. Tweeted/X'd the beer emoji? Get ready for Heineken ADs.

> whereas the younger crowd barely use them. (

As far as I can tell the emojis thing is (has been) mostly a millenials thing, the zoomers are mostly on the side of AAVE-speak and such related jargon (the famous fr fr, for example, even actively avoiding capitalisation is now seen as a thing).

So, yeah, I'd say that the emojis have passed the peak of cool relevancy, hence why they're discussed on this quite boring forum by definitely not cool men in their late 20s and 30s (I'm a definitely not cool man in my early 40s myself).

What is the difference between "the cake she made was terrible :-)" and "the cake she made was terrible :-("?

The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies read to me like malicious intent vs agreeable disappointment. I.e.,

"The cake that horrible coworker of mine made was terrible, and everyone hated it. I delight in this schadenfreude." vs "The cake my loving and adorable girlfriend made me for my birthday was terrible, and while I appreciate the effort, it was hard to stomach. "

> The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies (...)

Russian smiles are even more advanced. They use only one sign ")" and "(". Of course you can multiply them.

"I still ate some and feel fine" vs. "I've been sitting on the toilet for the last 25 minutes".

I just read them all as "tiny little indistinguishable blob." Too small to see what they are, and other than the smiley-face and a few others, completely devoid of any meaning. Someone sends me an email and all it says is, "[blob] [blob] [blob]" —? I can't be bothered to read your mind, please re-send using words.

While I sympathize with finding the imagery too small to read quickly, I think this is an elitist attitude that you'll find increasingly separates you from your younger peers. You don't have to lace your own sentences with emoji, but to declare sentences you read that contain them to be devoid of meaning, I think you're prejudicially shutting down lots of dialogue.

While useful, I think that emojis should not have been included in Unicode.

Unicode is supposed to be a universal standard, but the inclusion and exclusion of some emojis is an ideological issue. The inclusion and wide usage of emojis gives the Unicode consortium a disproportionate degree of influence over the way we communicate.

It boggles my mind that emoji can be used in an URL.

Yeah, I have some emoji domains, though the support is weird. Safari actually supports them best.

I keep finding weird places that support emojis, like usernames on some web sites. And someone on HN showed me recently that you can make emoji filenames in Windows at least.

Yeah that was pretty cool, although I guess you run the risk of some browsers presenting it unrendered. If I had a majority of mobile users for a site, I probably wouldn't think twice before using an emoji in my url -- definitely makes it memorable

Idle comment,

I perpetually react poorly to the wink icon, at least, as it appears on Apple devices.

I get the sense people intend it to mean "droll wink" which is inclusive and often characteristic of good humored positive "play."

For me the icon parses as a more confrontational eyebrow raise, sardonic shading into sarcastic, with a whiff of the scornful, contemptuous, or hostile.

It's not a big deal, but it's been years and I still have to hand-hold myself past the intuitive reaction by reminding myself that's almost never how it was meant.

I wish you could swap out the glyphs.

Oh my, Internet, what have you done with smileys ;(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

One of my earlier bits of tinkering when I was younger was jailbreaking my iPhone and finding the code in the Japanese iPhone OS build that enabled emojis and using it to enable emojis on my American iPhone. If I recall correctly, I was then able to send them to other iPhones, but of course no one could reciprocate. I thought I was pretty cool! Most people didn’t really understand their point, and it wasn’t until they were added to the American build where people warmed up to them.

I still don't understand why emojis had to be added to Unicode. Sure, it helped with adoption but now we've got descriptive glyphs ("beaming face with smiling eyes") but every font displays them slightly or sometimes even very differently. In some cases, depending on what phone/font my conversation partner uses, we might interpret emojis completely differently and we won't even know!

This podcast had an interesting deep dive on the history of on emoji recently - https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology

She went into the unicode side of things as well.

♥

How is this possible? I thought HN stripped emojis.

It's the “black heart suit”.

Yes, it's U+2665, which is considered to be an emoji according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode, though U+2661 ("white heart suit", ♡) isn't. Probably HN treats ♥ and ♡ the same way, as ordinary characters, though.

I find it disturbing that we consider emoji sufficiently expressive to stand in for the depth of meaning that a well-crafted passage can convey.

In particular, I have lamented the paucity of information that modern short form social media - 280 character Tweets; 10 second shorts; soundbytes, quips, and shitposts on Reddit - is able to carry. There simply is not enough information within the medium to sufficiently disambiguate the multiple senses and interpretations one can read into the message, and I believe it is this lack of being able to even agree on what is being said that leads to so much miscommunication and conflict today.

After all, any reading or interpretation of a message requires some form of _projection_ on the audience's part onto the canvas of the medium.

Frege once wrote, "Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea." [0] Perhaps it is for this reason that Victorian-era writers (John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" comes to mind) employed such a flowery and verbose brand of English; it is only by sketching out their ideas in high enough resolution that one can have some hope in hell of conveying an idea to their reader, intact and bearing at least some resemblance to whatever it is they had in mind.

To steal an idea from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 4.026: "The meanings of the simple signs (the words) must be explained to us, if we are to understand them." If one does not take the time to expand upon the definitions or the subtleties of the words, signs, or emoji they use, it is no surprise that some misunderstanding may arise.

Why then, do we suppose that emoji will indeed communicate, unambiguously, the shades and nuances of meaning that we intend, simply because they bear some resemblance to a real-world object or common symbol? Did you contextualize its usage adequately? Is that picture indeed "worth a thousand words?" Which thousand did you choose when you last punched in that heart emoji?

Emoji have progressed to a fourth-order simulacrum, in Baudrillard's terminology: "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever." Where perhaps emoji once may have been able to refer to the depth of meaning, the underlying reality to which they point, I find they are now carelessly thrown around, often, as another commenter has mentioned below, towards manipulative ends. Even the simple heart emoji is not something I've even used with my father over iMessage until very recently. Love is after all, a very powerful concept, and yet here we are, throwing it around willy-nilly, left and right, to people we haven't even met in person - or worse, _next to the links to purchase reddit premium or reddit gold._ Far from being an actual message of _agape_ or even _philia,_ which may have been a function of a first-order simulacrum, where the map accurately reflected the territory, it has become a hollow icon, meant to evoke some sentiment or feeling in the reader by its presentation alone, and not by virtue of its connection to some actual underlying sense of love.

Baudrillard also writes: "All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?"

I am not a Christian, or perhaps even a religious man, but the example is quite poignant. Can you draw me an emoji, an icon, of what was once taken to be the highest and most ineffable concept? And if emoji can fall short of communicating one ideal, why not others?

Yet here we are, exchanging hollow signs in a lifeless, meaningless formal system of cold syntax, bereft of semantics.

[0] http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf

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