Question #227

[weofodthignen]

Your opinion of emojis.

Comments

[ahmik]

I very seldom use more than one emoji at a time. Simply me. But I can't stand emoji storms, where people create essays out of the damned things. Or they include ten of the same emoji in a row. What's that about? Afraid I'll miss the point?

Skapi

[weofodthignen]

I'm a bit puzzled by the concept: visual symbols can be hard to parse across cultures, and they surely expected what's happened with people both misinterpreting things and deliberately adapting their meaning, for example to talk about sex. But my main issue is that they're so damned small. Unless I am already very familiar with the symbol, I can't see what it is, and I understand a lot of people have that problem. Why aren't they coded so they can be embiggened, like fonts? As it is, more than half the time they're just unreadable clutter.

[ravan]

Emojis can be fun. I will use them as punctuation emphasis. They're not a substitute for words.

[dubhain]

Necessary evil.

I generally dislike them, but I use them a lot and find them useful. Text-based communication is notoriously imprecise and a horrible medium for conveying nuance and the sort of emotional subtext generally passed via body language and vocal inflection. Emojis, imperfectly, help bridge this information gap.

[weofodthignen]

I use smileys for that, tho less than many people. The relatively limited range makes them less likely to be headscratching '-)

[arlie]

I find them useful especially as a reaction to someone else's post, in systems that support this, such as Slack:
1) you can post encouragement/reaction without starting a conversation
2) it's easier for an Aspie to fake normal reactions with emojis (if everyone's using them) than with actual text, which can be helpful in work environments

But: beware that the emoji you type on your Apple device may be different when your friend sees it on their Android device (unconfirmed, but suspected), and/or the vocabulary available won't match, and the names often totally fail to match what the picture suggests to me. So maybe you aren't "saying" quite what you intended.