Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons?
Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons?
Reading comments in different communities, I noticed that users hardly leave smilies. Why is that?
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
My hypothesis: Lemmy has an older userbase, and in general older people feel less of a need to express their emotions. They're busier discussing the topic than highlighting their attitude towards it.
Perhaps cultural reinforcement plays a role, too. As emoticons and emojis are less used, they feel more out of place, so people who'd use them elsewhere avoid them here.
Emoticons are representations of emotions. We don't have those. We're dead inside.
We don't like when people add color to our monochromatic text.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aside from using them in reactions during discussions with group that I know (Discord, Chat/Hangouts), they're too fuzzy in definition to be useful in conversations. When reading on Lemmy if I run into emoticons, I just skip over them as noise in the stream. I don't even try to figure out what the person is trying to convey since I'm not going to be able to track whatever the latest trends are in their meaning. It's the same reason you don't spam a public forum like this with youth slang if you want to communicate with a wide demographic of members.
Why I personally don't use emoji that often, especially on Lemmy, in no particular order:
- I don't feel the need to indicate emotion or facial expression as much as in a personal conversation.
- combination of a high resolution monitor I'm sitting kind of far away from makes most of them look like nearly identical yellow circles.
- There's like nine variations of sticking tongue out. And a lot of them were decided by the Japanese so a thing that looks like it's teasing officially means "I AM DISRESPECTFUL TO DIRT" so emoji are generators of misunderstanding. Especially when different systems render them differently so a face that looks scared on a Samsung might look angry on an Apple or like an office building on a PC.
- I'm on a PC, typing on an actual keyboard. To insert an emoji, I have to move my hand to a mouse and navigate a menu. That menu isn't provided by the system itself; it may or may not be provided by the text box itself, and they're all different and have their own quirks. And I'm sick of learning them.
- I just can't help it, the habit some folks have of either replacing nouns with emoji aka "I went to the 🏜️ and crammed a 🌵 up my 🍑 and now it's ⭕ " or even worse the MLM Hun tactic of typing the word outright then adding a corresponding emoji just feels childish and dumb to me.
Call me an old man yelling at cloud if you want but simple shit like :) worked for conveying emotional tone or facial expression in a way that emoji just don't. Like consider these two: 😀 😃 "Smiling face" and "Smiling face with big eyes." Without them right next to each other, you probably wouldn't realize the difference, so why are they both in the standard?
Well, personally, I grew up with more primitive emoticons and usually just eschew including smiles entirely. I'll use them with friends but I tend to communicate more formally in public forums.
8===D
In-group signalling. One of the many microhabits you need to acquire in order to fit in with the local culture and nothing more. As usual, people make up reasons to justify why their cultural proclivities are objectively right but these are without exception completely post-hoc.
For some reason emojis just feel out of the place here and reddit. I do use them in private chats and whatnot though
Emojis really don't have a use outside of shitpost communities. I very rarely will use them here on Lemmy
ಠ_ಠ
I think my Lemmy client does not support emojis, but it supports Lenny faces. Maybe that's why, Lemmy loves Lenny ʕ ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°ʔ
Because you don't have no script to easily add emoticons, like for /kbin? ¯_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯
i prefer to use them in microblogging platforms like mastodon :3
use your words!
They have better taste.
I don't really feel the need to use them to express myself. I try to use words instead :-)
(≧ω≦)
¯\(o‿o)/¯
🤷
Good question 🤔
And Merry Christmas to all.
🐱🐕🦺🦝🦝🐱🦮🦝🐱🐕🦺🐩🐩🐩👘👗🦿🤳💅🤳🦾🦾😊🥲🥲😗😇😊😘🫢🫢🫢🤐🤨🫣🤨🥱🥱😫😫😫😈😈👿💔💗💗💌💓💔💔💔💫🦝🐩💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯🐩💯💯🍑🍉🍉🥭🍑🍑🫒🌽🌽🫐🍓🥕🥕🍅🍅🥔🥒🥒🫒🥕🥬🥜🥜🥖🧇🫘🥦🫘🍧🦞🦐🚒🚒🚌🕔🕔🕝🌐⛰️🏛️🪵🏢🏢🏢🏛️🏛️🗽⛩️⛩️⛪⛪⛪⛩️🌁🌁🎱🥌🎿🪀🎿🪁💿⌨️🖨️📲☎️🪫📹💡🕯️📕💹💹🧾🏷️✒️✒️🖍️🖍️💼🎀🎁🎊🎊🎁(⌒_⌒;) (＃
Д´) (*♡∀♡) ╰(▔∀▔)╯ (⌒_⌒;) (＃Д´) (｡•́︿•̀｡) (・・ ) ? (・・ ) ? (＠_＠) (T_T) (눈_눈) (＃Д´) (⊙_⊙) w(°ｏ°)w (T_T) (눈_눈) (＃Д´) (＃Д´) (＃Д´) (✯◡✯) (o▽o) (‿) ╰(▔∀▔)╯ ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶ (‿)People keep asking this....
God damn the kids really don't know the difference. Anyways i use it less probably because I'm browsing Lemmy on my phone in-between other tasks, but maybe I'll start spicing things up.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
We could invert the question: why do people wherever you're contrasting use them more?
Maybe because this is (still) the more adult place?
Emoticons are too personal, emotional. Lemmy and Reddit are community oriented
E(o)3
E(@)3 bonus prolapse edition
You just reminded me of this awesome bot on Reddit called "please respect tables".
There is still a subreddit about this, though it's been abandoned
It would be fun to have it here too! 😄
We’re old AF.
╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮
I think one of the biggest reasons for the switch from emoticons to emoji can be seen in this thread, emojis are pretty much universally supported whereas a lot of emoticons break Markdown (specifically anything with a backslash or a less-than sign)
Because lemmy users tend to be tech literate millennials or older, who were using the internet before it became a widely popular and used thing.
We remember a time before emojis. And to us, there is art, and more meaning in continuing the old ways of using textual symbols in clever ways to convey an emotion.
Emojis are a cop out, a cheap and easy way to do the same, invented for a mass audience that didnt want to do any thinking or be clever in any kind of way and wanted it all handed to them.
I realize this may sound silly but I will die on this hill: emojis are for children and the technically illiterate, they are an appropriation of a culture spawned by some gen x and mostly millennials when the curious of us forged our own way onto what was at one point in time a frontier of seemingly infinite possibility.
Because.
I just find the generic yellow emojis used on most platforms annoying. Forums, Discord servers, or other sites that have custom emojis or older-looking "smilies" are more appealing to me.
In chats I use emojis very often, but I here I feel like some emojis may not show properly, so I avoid them. Though here I tend to use smiles and such :)
I'm too old to understand Zoomer hieroglyphics and I'm too young to use them like hashtags and/or punctuation the way Boomers do.
I manly use them in place of physical gestures.🤷♂️
⋆ᗰદ૨૨ʏ⋆ᐠ₍⁽˚⑅̆˚⁾₎ᐟ⋆ᘓમ૨ıડτന੨ડ⋆
Dunno
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
:o)
Ü ü
🐪💩
🍆 🍑
UwU
🫄