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

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    2·
    2 years ago

    second a few other comments, a lot of people conflating emoticons and emojis

    • emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • emoji: 🤷
    • emoticon: =>^.^<=
    • emoji: 🐱
    • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      2 years ago

      It’s understandable. Back in the old old days, these 😱 were often called emoticons. The reason was that the chat software that people used to automatically replaced ;-) by 😉. The menu was the same and the name of this menu was emoticon.

      One of the most famous example of this is MSN Messenger.

      People keep the habit to call them emoticons.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Very true. Also, I believe you forgot to escape the 2nd ^ symbol? I think it should look like this:

      =>\^.\^<=

      =>^.^<=

  • vexikron@lemmy.zip
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • nl4real@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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

    • Slow@lemmy.todayOP
      0·
      2 years ago

      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?

        • Slow@lemmy.todayOP
          0·
          2 years ago

          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?

          • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
            0·
            2 years ago

            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.

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
      0·
      2 years ago

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

      • ambiance@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        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

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • MJBrune@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I feel like emoticons are in some ways cheating at using words and thus it shows a lack of effort put into your communication. I use them mostly in quicker format messaging like Discord. I don’t blame anyone for using a 🤷 or such but I’d like to try to be more eloquent.

    • ryan@the.coolest.zone
      0·
      2 years ago

      While I get what you’re saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, “what people say” is only half the story, and “how they say it” (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

      When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. “… he said, cheerfully”; “… he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice”; “she said, while averting her eyes”.

      In first person communications like social media, we don’t really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit’s usage of “/s” to indicate sarcasm.

      We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like “while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above.” (This might be an example of “overly eloquent” and there is probably a happy medium.)

      I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can’t tell!

      • MJBrune@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Absolutely, and it isn’t to say I never use emoji/emoticons but I don’t on social media that much. You can convey emotion and vibe with a bit of nuanced typing. This is likely lost on some folks but others seem to be tuned to it, almost like body language. Grammarly actually has a tone mapper built in to tell you what sort of tone you are sending out.

    • Slow@lemmy.todayOP
      0·
      2 years ago

      What if you tried to express your emotional attitude to the person you are talking to? Or try to describe how you feel when you have had a good day.

      I don’t always do it well in text messages and then I use emoticons to reflect emotion.

      • MJBrune@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Emoji might be the right choice there. Sometimes I’ll just send back 🤷 or a gif in text messages or quicker formats but for something like Lemmy or Mastodon, I think a more effortful reply is desired since the point of those services is the conversation.

  • ani@endlesstalk.org
    0·
    2 years ago

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