Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons?

Slow@lemmy.today to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 212 points –

Reading comments in different communities, I noticed that users hardly leave smilies. Why is that?

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For me emoticons were something that started when all of the boomers came to Facebook. Floods and floods of useless emojis left and right. So now I feel weird using them, like I'm cheapening the platform while also acting like the people that ruined Facebook for me

Are emojis considered emoticons? Call me old but I think this is an emoticon ;-) and this is an emoji 😉

Agreed! Although the little image things on message boards like phpBB, ProBoards and Invision were also emoticons, even though they were basically early onset emojis

Emoticons are old internet. Emojis are boomer, normie, and corpo friendly translations.

Wait, who was using "old Internet" if not boomers?

The nerds who made the tech.

Psst.. the nerds were mostly boomers...

I know my one professor used punch cards and worked on some of the data structures. But it was people who cared about how tech worked.

Most boomers I know still can't use a mouse. Millennials and gen X fill most of the old Internet in my mind, but the original '91 Internet was a lot of tech focused boomers, but also was significantly Gen X. '95-'99 seemed to pick up more traction with my generation.

I think it's sample bias. I graduated with a CS degree in 85 and started working as a software engineer in aerospace. It was pretty much all boomers when I started.

There might be more people from later generations who grew up doing their homework on computers, so the disparity between tech folks and non-tech folks in those later generations seems less, but the Internet was mostly created by boomer tech people.

I'm the senior manager of the organization I started in in 85, and I still have boomers working for me.

I have a negative attitude to standard emoticons built into Android and iOS. They don’t look good, they’re too many.

I'm interested to know who uses emoticons depicting, for example, player rewind icons or rectangular shapes. Are there people who use these emoticons at least once a year?

I make apps and I use them for prototyping buttons and stuff... So yeah, pretty often.

Sounds intriguing. How does that look?

Could just look like this. It's a dumb little stopwatch app I made some time ago to explain a different concept. All it uses is plain HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Because I could use emojis as icons, I didn't need to bring in a separate icon pack.

If I didn't have access to emojis at all, I probably would have just used text only... But if I'm prototyping an app that I'm building for someone else, it helps make it look closer to the real thing, and that's kinda nice.

Hmm... Then wouldn't it be logical on the part of mobile OS developers to make the extended set of emoticons hidden by default and enabled through system settings? Or make an extended set of smileys as an app that can be installed through the app directory?

Maybe! The MacOS emoji picker actually does this: You can choose which categories to include or omit, and set favorites... And not all of them are enabled by default. No reason phone keyboards couldn't do the same thing. MacOS calls most of what we'd consider "emojis" to be one category though, lol... So that wouldn't actually solve the problem. But it's possible.

Installing them like an app wouldn't really be a thing though-- Emojis are part of Unicode, which means they're essentially text characters. You wouldn't want to omit those from the system entirely, because if they appear in text, you still want to be able to render them. Kind of like... You might not need (or want) a convenient way to write an "é," but it'd be annoying if somebody wrote "the appetizers were good, but the entrée was just okay" and you saw "entr�e" because you didn't have the right app installed.

Personally, I'd rather have access to everything and just use search to find the one I want, but it might be nice to have the option to omit categories that you aren't interested in.