Why 🤷♂️ do users 👨💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭?
Ok, the title was an overuse of emojis as a joke. But seriously, I like some limited use of emojis because it helps me convey intention/emotion so that I'm less misunderstood and also adds some more feeling/fun to text content 😄
I think of them like swear words. Not on-the-internet swearing, but public swearing. To use their full power, words like "fuck" need context and - more importantly - discretion and frugal usage.
Overuse of emojis is even easier and harder to look at. But when used right, they serve a purpose. Otherwise it's "Why the fuck do users fucking dislike the fucking use of emojis on fucking Lemmy?"
it can quickly get unreadable. I mean, I'm fine having a smiley to mark-down the humour/sarcasm, or the bad news but on some social media it's like
*During 🍑 🍆 the 🐱 👁️🗨️ at 💑 *
Even more straightforward stuff can still be messy, I am not saving much by writing 🇧🇪 still has no government (Is that Romania ? Germany ? Belgium ? ) over Belgium still has no government
Three is the maximum allowed by the cringe police.
After three according to the judgement of the Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale you belong to the Facebook boomer jail. Enjoy the nationalist/racist/sexist/lame minion "memes".
When I see more than three laughing emojis a sitcom laughter is automatically playing in my head. It feels like being forced to laugh at gunpoint.
what exactly have you seen people saying when they complain? when they do it like you did in the title, it's just too busy for my eyes, I've been in Discord servers where the moderators ask people to remove most of the Emojis from their username because of how annoying it is (to them apparently. I find it a little obnoxious but not enough to care).
Excessive emojis make reading difficult. It's just as bad as posts. That. Are. Written. Like. This. My internal voice pauses for ever period, likewise, I have to interpret every inline emoji. It's mentally tiring, and while forums like this aren't formal, when I see abused emoji use, I instinctively write off a comment or post as juvenile and low quality. I'm more inclined to skip reading it entirely because of the extra effort required and my pre judgement of its contents.
Tagging an emoji to the end or light use to help convey emotions is fine and intuitive. I personally like them for quick response and like you, to add a little more context to text where the "voice" may be missed.
One thing I really hate is when people use that clap emoji between every word to try to solidify what they're saying.
Doing that, or saying "full stop", etc. doesn't make me trust what you're saying more. Explain why what you're saying is correct. Use words, logic, and sources.
I see emojis as text's substitute for body language. Body language is supposed to supplement the spoken word. Emojis should supplement the paragraph.
Trying to communicate with more emojis than text is akin to trying to communicate with more body language than spoken word.
Ever try to say something but forget the word, and you try to convey the meaning with body language instead? Overuse of emojis implies a similar lapse of thought.
Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It's only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.
Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that's the point, obviously. It's the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.
Me, personally, I usually don't need emoji seasoning. I'm fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that's just my lame opinion.
And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I'm always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They're not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it's written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn't quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I'm on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.
Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn't rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I'd use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.
Imagine if every language in the world used the exact same alphabet, exact same words with the exact same spelling, and exact same sentences but the meaning of those words/sentences varied from person to person, region to region, in different contexts, and sometimes changed day to day. Then on top of that, the words even rendered differently from device to device.
Additionally, there was no way to look up what those words meant to the person writing them, who you don't even know. Even if you ask for clarification, there's less than 50% chance they'll respond at all, let alone provide a sincere, meaningful, and accurate answer.
That's what emojis are like to me. Sure, some of these same complaints apply to text-based communication as well, but emojis take it to the extreme.
I don't typically care that much if people use them -- for instance, to reinforce the meaning or intention of their message. But it's mildly annoying when the emojis are a message all of their own and that person is trying to communicate with me.
Additionally, there's an extremely high degree of correlation between people and messages that use a bunch of emojis and actual quality of the message/meaning being sent. In other words, if someone's using a lot of emojis to communicate, I can pretty much completely disregard anything they have to say because it almost certainly holds no value to me. And that's okay.
So maybe in a broader sense, comments/titles/descriptions with lots and lots of emojis is annoying similar to seeing advertisements at the top of my search results and interspersed in the front page posts. It's useless drivel that mucks up the experience.
And even to use your description as an example:
I don't understand at all how that emoji is necessary or even insightful. It seems completely contradictory to the "But seriously" at the start of the sentence, it doesn't seem like anybody with any degree of reading comprehension would mistake what you're saying as being something negative/nasty/mean/hurtful/etc so it's like if I ended my sentence with "and I'm currently chewing gum". Okay, nice to know I guess, but why would I need to be told that?
Using them like the title here, I hate them too. You only need a few, and they should be conveying the same emotion that the text is being written as. 😮💨
They can be pretty good at expressing sarcasm. Especially the eye roll one.
I think it might just be the old creeping in. Kids like emojis, and they weren't around when we were kids, so it is new and strange so I don't like it, etc.
Overuse of emojis can also really be annoying for people using screen readers. They clapping hands get clapping hand to clapping hands hear clapping hands something clapping hands like clapping hands this. So it's also an accessibility issue.
I like them used sparingly. There's art to using just the right emoji in the right spot that conveys a message in a way that is difficult to achieve with text.
I don't mind them when used appropriately, but remember that us old people may struggle to make out which emoji we're looking at when the text is small.
To my eyes it also looks out of place in professional writing, so I would find it hard to take you seriously if you use emojis in such a context.
TL;DR: in a casual context, go nuts, but avoid for important communication where clarity and professionalism matters.
I grew up with forums where emoticons were substituted with smiley images (on badly coded ones, "8)" turned into "😎" even when it was just a parenthetical ending with the number 8 or the eighth point in a bullet point list). I use emoji approximately when I would have used those smileys, it is a good thing they're now standardized, but other than that I find them unnecessary and distracting.
At the font sizes I tend to view text in, I can read text clearly but emoji just look like blobs. The details are so small that ALL of the faces look like yellow circles.
There are so many emoji, many of them with only slight differences between them, that they render each other meaningless.
So many of them are being used as something else and keeping up with their actual meaning is just not worth the time.
It definitely depends on the instance, but as a whole it’s probably a bit of carryover culture from the other place where emoji are not generally accepted.
I haven't specifically seen anyone go off the rails when it comes to emoji usage on Lemmy; I can only comment on my particular feelings about emoji: Like any tool, emoji can be used in ways which are confusing. However, the value of these little images conveying additional context to written text is useful. There is so much of the personal voice which is lost with written words, unadorned with body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. Emoji are like a written solution to this issue (for those that don't pick up on context on words alone). I am fine with the usage of emoji.
Using one or two occasionally to convey emotion or humor is one thing, but they're neither words not punctuation marks. Using them as such is not just annoying, but actively disrupts the rhythm of the words you're reading - especially if they're plunked into the middle of a sentence or clause. It's like saying "I love HEART cheeseburgers." Go ahead, say it that way to somebody in person and see how they react.
It's funny because I love them to death on slack. I think I prefer emojis as reactions rather than inline text. Also if you put them in line it can f*** up search
I don't have any fundamental issue with emojis when they're used to expand meaning or provide clarity. Eg you could use an emotive emoji to show/clarify the intent/emotion of something. Imo, using emojis in this way is no different than the practice of adding a "/s" to denote sarcasm. When they get annoying is when they're used superfluously; if they serve no purpose, then it's just clutter.