I’m a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, 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
I noticed that every time I add an emoji to a comment it gets downvoted, so I tested my theory, wrote a comment without an emoji, got upvotes, went back and added an emoji, got downvotes…
On Reddit people use emojis a lot, on Lemmy I NEVER saw anyone use emojis, my account is new but still for the time I spent here, I never saw the use of emojis
So, is it just me, have you noticed this small detail ? and do you miss emojis the way I do ? 😭
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.
If the color is what’s bothering you the most, there are black and white emoji fonts out there. For example, Noto Emoji.
I get where you’re coming from, and don’t entirely disagree, but at the same time I’m grateful to emojis for spurring interest in and adoption of Unicode. The situation a little over a decade ago was much different, with many devices supporting only ASCII. It was also so much more complicated to use a computer for multiple languages, with so many different encoding standards. Nowadays Unicode seems to work well for most languages. And users have come to expect support for it on whatever platform they’re using. Even if it’s true that some users only demand that support due to emojis, I certainly don’t want to go back to how things used to be.
Unicode support is great - and necessary for a lot of stupid emoticons, as well. But even without emoji there’d be dumb shit like post titles in fancy fonts, or… usernames with each letter in a blue rectangle.
That kind of thing becomes an arms race for attention.
Reddit had a ton of problems, but it was a relief getting away from people spamming HTML gimmicks in titles and comments. That is a cultural issue more than a tech issue. The same stupidity is possible even just doing ALL CAPS YELLING. Emojis specifically get namedropped and rejected because of how egregiously they stand out, and the low-effort responses they innately encourage. Like if you had a second keyboard that could only type LOL, ROFL, LMAO, etc.
old man yells at cloud
Old man yells at font.
And trolls.
buddy you just wasted 3 paragraphs whining about emojis cause it messes up your nostalgia for 90’s internet. the future is now old man, if you want plain text get on a fucking BBS. signed, someone born this century. get with the times.