On Reddit people use emojis a lot

I find this really funny. I used reddit for about a decade, and I remember redditors absolutely hating emojis. Reddit really changed, in the time I used it and rarely did it change for the better.

Downvotes aren't gonna stop me posting this lil guy 🐢

For me personally, it annoys me when emojis are used as a lazy replacement for language and it quickly deteriorates into 🥺🥺😭😭😢😭😭😰😰🙏🙏🙏 sort of bullshit.

In other communication I sometimes throw in a single smiley face because I've been told that middle aged women in particular interpret messages as passive aggressive if I don't.

Honestly, as long as you're not going for a clickbait-like thing with lots of 😂, 😭, and 💀, when is not really justified, I don't really see an issue.

Personally I'll use ✨, ☺️, 🌸, and 🥺 regularly in my comments as I think they're cute 🥺✨

I much prefer emoticons over emojis, but I couldn't tell you why.

To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds "Sent from my iPhone" to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you've purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of "this is fine" lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.

Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, "Look! That one's sad! I'm sad! These emojis really 'get' me! I'm gonna use them!"

They're expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, "Some is better than none". But I can't shake feeling like I'm being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don't understand how others are satisfied with that.

Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you're using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you're on a platform that doesn't render them the same for every user, you'll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform's walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.

That isn't to say that I hate emojis, or that I don't think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you're using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social "recapturing", taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.

It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there's no joke there. That's just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.

The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform's smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.

Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you've sent, that's successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can't. As long as you're being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn't be able to express yourself.

Come to hexbear, we love emojis here lol

On Reddit people use emojis a lot

Really? We must have used different subs. Maybe that's the answer, you're the only guy from r/emojipasta or whatever to make the switch.

Probably because we on Hexbear use them, and we have a lot of them. Let them seethe.

They hate us for our freedom

Too bad!

Imagine giving a fuck about who upvotes or downvotes you on Lemmy ☠️

Just use whatever you feel comfortable with it, I sometimes use emojis, other times simple stuff like :) or other times this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some of it may be an age thing, in my own case, i dislike emojis because i have no idea what most of them are supposed to mean., including the one at the end of your post. So for older folks like me, they make the post look weird, and can make it more difficult for me to understand what it is that you are trying to communicate.

But i wouldn't actually downvote you for it, im just more likely to ignore your post if it is overflowing with emojis.

because they hate having fun

Reddit was at the extreme end of emoji rejection as far as I ever saw. Odd that you experienced differently. I often saw well-upvoted comments such as "downvote due to emoji use" next to heavily downvoted emojis on Reddit.

Not an emoji fan myself, but each to their own.

Zoomers replying with a comment of just

😭😭😭😭😭

is the most low effort and stupid type of response. I miss the old days of Reddit where people actually followed reddiquette, and hope that shit doesn't come here.

Are the Hexbear emotes still really big cause if so I kinda get it

Never been on Hexbear before, eh?

Ask your admins to implement some emojis. We have them on LW, but nobody ever really use them. Just a culture thing I guess.

its funny reddit used to be extremely anti emoji, there's something about them being feminine coded, something about real men using real words, big manly words, the bigger and the more the manlier, utter your inclinations with the utmost exuberance, kind stranger, for I am a maker of quotes! the narwhal bacons at midnight, pippip cheerio

I was not aware that emoji were suddenly socially acceptable on le reddit

we are of a higher intelectual standard

🍷🧐

🤔😔🤷🤷🤦

I really like them as dumb little "reactions" in chats (as in: emojis other can attach to a message) but, for longer, more thoughtful text posts, they usually distract from the content IME.

I also don't like how they're usually, well I don't know how to describe it but: Overly emotional. Your crying emoji is a good example; you're not actually crying an ocean because you miss emojis, you're just a little sad about it (I assume).

This "always taking everyting to the extreme" really annoys me about our current society. There is no moderation anymore; it feels like you must either be extremely happy or extremely sad/angry/whatever. You can no longer be "a little sad about it", you must show that you're crying a river over it or whatever.

I think that may be one of the reasons why I prefer emoticons. They don't have that problem as much as you can't easily express extreme emotions with them. :'( is about as bad a "crying" usually gets for example and when someone writes xD, you know they're taking a piss.

People get mad because they see hexbear users having fun with emojis instead of writing a bunch of words to say nothing. I spoiler tag my emojis in other Lemmy's as a result.

::: spoiler spoiler

I am being censored by the emoji/civility cop in my head. :::

A single emoji to add a little mood at the end of a comment is fine. As soon as I have to interpret a fucking code I’m downvoting and moving on.

We use them all the time on

Reddit had a whole thing about looking down on emojis for whatever reason. But during the influx over the summer there was a discussion here somewhere about whether we were going to keep that attitude going here, and the general consensus was no because it's ridiculous.

We've been using emojis and their earlier equivalents to help clarify meaning and intent (as well as for humour, obviously) for as long as I've been on the internet, which means they've been in common use since at least the mid-to-late 90s. I use them all the time, all over Lemmy and Mastodon, and haven't had anyone comment on it or call it out (except once but that was in a positive way).

It's possible different communities have different attitudes, but unless you're using them in an inappropriate way I expect the downvote thing is more of a coincidence (or possibly one person with a weird anti-emoji vendetta, we all know there are weird folks out there) rather than a site-wide culture thing.

p.s. just realised I got through a whole post without any of the things for once so here's a few of my most often used just to brighten things up 😄 😅 😬 🤓 👍

It's annoying if someone sends only a single emoji like 😂. Like I don't need your reaction I need your WORDS OF WISDOM (discussion). Especially on a public forum.

I've always found emoji haters to just be weird crotchety redditors in general, I've looped around from being one as a kid to like coming to appreciate them nowadays, also custom emojis are cool AF and I can't wait until Lemmy starts to fix the problem with Lemmy emojis getting shown massively to users from other instances so I don't have to keep a mental checklist of which emojis get mega sized to non Hb users

::: spoiler example

It looks like this on my end:

On the contrary, I've hardly seen emojis on Reddit while here they appear a lot more frequently.

It might be an issue of the crowd you flock with? I haven't seen emoji hatred on Lemmy, in fact I recall more support for it.

The only occasions where it's frowned upon is when they are overused, it can be tiring to read a text littered with an emoji every four words.

Semi-related, but does any one else feel creeped out by the basic smiley emoji? 🙂

The cold dead eyes peer into my soul with judgement. That's why I always use a different smiling emoji ☺️

This isn't like Reddit, which is full of elite snobs thinking they are better than others.

Emojis help communicating. I'm convinced it is the part written language has been missing since the dawn of writing.

It is the difference between:

"You are so amazing 😄"

and

"You are so amazing 🙄 "

I have nothing against moderate emoji use that accompanies coherent text, but I disagree that texting is a poor medium for communication. We've been effectively writing for thousands of years. It's a skill that can be difficult for some people, and can take practice to become good at, but that doesn't make it a bad medium.

Using one emoji is fine. Using several, or repeating the same one over and over, is a sign of a demented mind.

When people use emojis it makes me feel angry.

😠

Mostly I hate emojis because the majority of posts with them are shitposts.

Ppl on Lemmy are all old techies who if forced to use emoji would rather type out ;( than use emojis.

Overuse of the things looks trashy or spammy.

Think of some eyesore of a boomer facebook post with 97 different fonts and colours and styles.

Think of emojipasta and cummies

And then you get people who follow up all their nouns with little pictures of the object in question, and just why.

What do you want for dinner? I was thinking of ordering a pizza [picture of pizza]

It's potentially vague without the little picture, and utterly redundant with it. It never helps.

Sure, the occasional :) or something in shortform text can be appropriate for the register, but it's very context sensitive - and the tone conveyed by most of the graphic emoji just makes me want to punch people. Again, they look like those horrible facebook avatar things, or assets from shitty freemium mobile games.

🤷

I question this post because no one seems to agree with you that reddit is a welcome place for emojis... They are rare there and tend to get downvoted

It gives me power

I think most people don't mind the use of emojis, it's the abuse they don't like. Spamming 😭😭😭😭 is annoying.

When used sparingly and to convey a specific emotion that wouldn't translate well only using text they're useful.

I feel like most people (assuming you're not on Reddit) don't really care, so long as you're not being spammy with them (or not just reply with only an emoji).

Every now and then I'll tack one on at the end of a comment if I think that my tone might come of a bit more passive aggressive than I intended it to be, but most of the time I just see it as "I might need to rewrite this so that it doesn't come off that way" instead.

I'm mentally old and out of touch with the kids, there are new emojis all the time and I have no idea what any of them mean. I spent all this time learning English and now half of the things people post are some sort of picture puzzle I lack the context to understand and have to guess the meaning of.

Use emojis or smileys or emoticons if you want to. It eases communication so why not 🤷

Alright, I don't want to sound offensive, but maybe work on your punctuation. You need a lot more periods instead of commas. Maybe that has some relation to it? I don't feel that adding emojis add anything, but especially when it's poorly written I feel like the person either is lazy or doesn't know what they're writting.

As far as I can tell, it's because Hexbear likes using them

ƪ(•̃͡ε•̃͡)∫

While I don't downvote posts with emojis I'm most interested in reading tech content, where emojis feel redundant and distracting.

One reason is that they don't translate well depending on the instance. For example, emojis from hexbear are extremely large on lemmy, which irritates some users when a comment section is full of emojis.

What are you talking about? I love them. 🥰❤️

Emoticons are superior ᕙ⁠(⁠ ͡⁠◉⁠ ͜⁠ ⁠ʖ⁠ ͡⁠◉⁠)⁠ᕗ

Reddit hates them too. I think the "old" Internet hates them, in general.

I feel very 🍄 about people using emojis.

I don't really like emojis, not the default ones anyways :)

Bunch of old Linux nerds (the first to settle in Lemmy) don't like emojis.

If you need to use emojis to convey feeling, emotion, or to emphasize your point-

You need to learn more words.

Emojis are a terrible method of communication. People have different interpretations of the same faces, and use them to mean different things. On top of that, they render differently depending on which device or service you are using, potentially sending a completely different message than you intended.

Tiny faces are ambiguous and usually don't help clarify a message.

Just use your words, it makes for better communication. Spell out what you mean and there's less room for misunderstanding.

A huge amount of emoji use is either a) entirely redundant, and thus just unsightly clutter in the text as it doesn't fit in with any typical fonts, or b) completely lacking in general, shared meaning, such that it fails at being effective communication.

And yeah, there are situations in which they work, but typically it typically only does so in specific subcultures that have a common understanding of what various emoji mean. Because I'm sure you don't consider 💢💢💢 needs correction 💢💢💢 to be a sensible response to your own emoji, but it would be for many people

Emojis are a waste to me, my eyesight is not good enough to differentiate whatever the fuck they are supposed to be saying. I don't like to throw around "ists" and "isms" but some people really do have accessibility issues, and emojis are not helpful at all. Too many of them are only reflecting inside jokes and elitism.

Use language, that is what it is there for.

I think the older generation got used to the stereotype that if people were posting with emojis, they would naturally be making more immature posts (being younger). There are a lot more people from the older generation on the Fediverse.

For an example of this generational gap: you mention that "On Reddit people use emojis a lot" - that genuinely is not the experience on Reddit I had: when I still used Reddit frequently, emojis were treated with the same level of disdain (which both explains and is explained by the condescension around the Emoji Movie).

So you're signalling that you're from a certain generation and looking to appeal to people who are similarly from that generation of people who like to use emojis to express themselves. That's going to attract some people and also going to rub others the wrong way. And that's fine! Keep using your emojis. You just might want to remember that a lot of the people who hated new Reddit and a lot of the people who left Reddit for Lemmy the first time are/were going to be old-timers (by internet standards), so you might find fewer like-minded people here.

As a last note, your saying you "miss emojis" makes me feel extra old (and I don't think I'm old at all!): it suggests that the time of emojis has not only eclipsed the internet culture I'm familiar with but has died out also. That's two eras. It's fortunate that at this current point in time, it seems like digital cultural eras can pass in weeks.

👉😎👉 zoop zoop

Ignore all votes on your comments and do what you want. Don't let a bunch of anonymous folks on the Internet change the way you communicate.

Reddit's popularity came from simplicity. It was a breath of fresh air, after late-90s forum culture, with flat linear threads bloated by signatures and avatars and quotes and blaaah. Nevermind the nested replies - we were so glad to have discussions where the names and words were the only content because the names and words are all that matter.

Emojis fucking ruined that. Emojis make it impossible to have plain text, anymore. Even if we accept they belong in a writing system - can you write yellow? Are you doing multicolor smiley faces, ever? These ugly little fixed icons stick out, which makes people more likely notice them, which makes people more likely to use them. It's a feedback loop that skews things back toward the bad old days of :laughing: :laughing: :smashwithhammer: :spork: (hr) [two paragraphs of boomer-ass one-liners]. On every fucking comment.

That revulsion carried over to lemmy because... it's the same people. We're here because the reddit corporation set its community on fire.

It'd matter a lot less if any browser or website ever defaulted to the symbols being black on white or vice-versa. Even then - there's something deeply distasteful about dealing with people who mistake their facial expressions for a counterargument. I'd much rather be told to fuck off than have some brainless troll spit a bucktooth-and-glasses smiley face, and then do it over and over in the face of any effort to explain why that's just garbage behavior. Concise, verbose, witty, blunt, dry, whimsical, doesn't fucking matter. They've got their "okay, boomer" and they're immune to words. One step above a toddler yelling "no!" at everything. A parasocial version, where other jackasses will come along and upvote them for doing it, while ha ha look at the other guy trying to have a conversation. Post the thought-terminating smug icon again. It'll be even funnier the seventh time.

, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you’ll get an idea of the face I’m making, so less chance of misunderstanding

[citation needed]

Several emojis are quite ambiguous in meaning or interpretation, including because of intercultural factors (eg.: U+1F626 FROWNING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH , or any of the praying / reverence / salute emojis). You, or rather your readers, also have no guarantees that the emoji they are seeing unambiguolsy matches the one you wanted to send and has not been misrepresented in transit or because of the provider (eg.: U+1F52B GUN which was rebranded into WATER PISTOL at different points by different providers).

In comparison, a classic Unicode / ANSI / JIS smiley is basically unambiguous and has two to four extra decades of context.

A simple text, even an acronym, is even better, for example rather than trying to express extreme displeasure at someplace else's lack of good gun control laws with a "prohibition sign" and "gun water pistol", you can use the even simpler text message of "your gun laws are bad".

Why do you even give a shit?
Use as many or as few emojis as you like, why waste your time and energy caring about some imaginary internet points (or worse - if some random stranger likes or doesn't like emojis)?

Emoji whatever you want. Cheers🍻

Hate is a strong word. I’d say I dislike them. And it’s probably only because I’m not a teenager.

They do? 😶

I find usage in posted content to be generally very low, although I agree that if used in a supportive manner they help a lot to differentiate various ways a sentence can be interpreted.

We've come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics. We've developed languages capable of expressing tiny details in amazing clarity; succinctly, pointedly, and without confusion as to their meaning.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics.

I'm almost of the opinion we've reached "peak human" and are now backsliding. Yes, of course it's self inflicted - how else could we as a species do an 'about face' and head back to cave dwelling? However it happens and whomever is responsible, here we are... and we're losing ground fast.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

I love emojis too :))

I need to get an emoji keyboard for my computer, because I feel so rude whenever I can't type '😅' or another fitting emoji 😅

Back in the day there was an advertisement for Infocom that said "A picture is worth a thousand words, we'd rather give you the thousand words"

I personally just think they are absolutely dumb compared to emoticons. I won't downvote a post/comment solely because of them, but I still think they're dumb.

My guess is the crowd here are less emotionally focused and more into STEM for a lack of a better term.

🤔

A few emojis are okay. That meme spam of putting one every two words or so is a waste of screen space.

Also what everyone else said: they are different everywhere so the meaning gets lost. Twitch emotes work for conveying meaning well because they look the same for everyone.

I think it's down to not wanting to be told how to feel about something, for me at least.

In addition to that most emojis diaplay really exaggerated emotions, so they're not even depicting OP's feelings that accurately.

I don't like emojis and never used them on purpose, just a few times before I found a setting to prevent the auto-replacement function in other apps. I kinda prefer pure text, couldn't tell you why. Maybe because they distract the eye too much. But for the same reason I dislike profile pictures, awards and gif/image reactions.

🫣

My Keyboard don't have emoji on android and on desktop I use Linux(Too Lazy to install a plugin or extension for my DE) :)

¯_(ツ)_/¯

The hate isn't nearly as bad as it was on reddit. While I usually don't use them even when I do it's normally not been an issue

i use text ones like ^_^ and :3

but i also love blobcats

and blobfoxes too!

😎 👉👉

I don’t like them because they can often be hard to see. There are so many of them now, and navigating them (for me) isn’t always easy.

I like the simple text based approach. Emojis invade every other aspect of online communication; it’s nice to have a place where I don’t feel pressured to insert them, especially for someone whose eyesight isn’t the best.

That’s just my rationale, but I can’t speak for everyone.

Despite having more emojis than most lemmy instances, I still rarely use them myself, but that's mostly because they're not intuitively built in to the reply/post UI/flow. You can get to them, but it's a bif of an effort 🤷‍♀️

I've never noticed anyone here hating on them.

But then again I'm on kbin and it doesn't federate downvotes, so the only downvotes we see are the ones by other kbin people.

🤓 elitism

In moderation they're totally fine, but for me personally it's just faster to type up an emoticon by hand than it is to search through tons of emojis or even use alt codes on Windows.

Women tend to use emojis more, so redditors and by extension lemmitors hate emojis

Text emojis are fine with me, but I personally don't like yellow spots on my clean black and white screen

I love emoji, the haters will have to pry them from my cold dead hands 😤

I've never noticed this to be honest, and I'm a heavy, heavy emoji user. Though I prefer the old-fashioned emoji's. I'd love to use ^_^ more, but the constant backslashes make my pinky hurt :)

Anyway, I like using emoji's because I'm a happy person and want to share a friendly smile :)

Join a downvote disabled server and you’ll never be concerned about petty things like this again.

There are fewer "normies" using Lemmy, so you get less "normie behavior".

I don't hate all emojis. I do hate how the vast majority of people use them.

Back when I used Skype, I freaking loved all of them because the animations made it very clear what someone is trying to express in an easy to understand way (assuming everyone in a given chat had a similar culture).

Discord is a not-so-close second. I like a decent chunk of the emojis because they are super expressive while being simple. More importantly, custom emojis allow for incredibly unique ways of expressing ideas that only a small group will understand. It's perfect for inside jokes.

In general, though? Emojis are so freaking bland and inoffensive. 90% of the time that they're used, there's literally 0 reason for them to be used. I don't need a page full of pregnant people and 16 variations of a family because it's nowhere near as effective as saying "I'm pregnant" or "I have 3 siblings." Whoever makes Unicode/these emojis is so hell-bent on inclusivity that they often ignore what makes human inclusivity so important: personality.

As for the people that use them on the daily? The vast majority seem like a hivemind. On YouTube you will literally find pages of "bro [insert incredibly basic observation] 💀😭" in a single comment section. It's one thing if it were a reference to something insane or unhinged like a copypasta, but it's another when it's a subconscious "can I copy your homework" over and over again. People overuse emojis in the same way that people type out "lmao" with a straight face in response to a meme. They're used out of laziness so often that they're becoming filler speech.

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Too Zoomer like 🤷‍♂️

People here are acting like regular words have no ambiguity or possibility of misinterpretation.

😺

For me, it's because of the cringe hexbear memes

Flashbacks of when liberal takes and western propaganda talkibg points were combatted with volumes of "pig poop balls"

😔