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.

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.

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.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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 😄 😅 😬 🤓 👍

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.

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 🙄 "

we are of a higher intelectual standard

🍷🧐