Emojis have their place. I use a few. I think people who viscerally hate them (like some folks ITT) are overreacting and need to mellow the fuck out. They’re no different than emoticons from yesteryear 😅

Emojis are only something kids and teenagers can use, because they are stylized in an infantile way and so express very strong emotions that you just don’t have any more as an adult.

So the only adults that use them are people who either have arrested development or trying to self-infantilize, where neither is really suited for 18+ online discussion boards.

So the only time you’ll really see emoji’s being used here is when they’re using sarcastically or for comedic effect, because they do work for that since they portray emotions that are exaggerated.

Otherwise it sticks out like if your dad who’s a lawyer wore a pikachu cap to work.

I’m old enough to think of emojis as hieroglyphics for teens.

No rules against them! We’re just old :p

Emoji are nice though, thanks for bringing it up.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I do post these emojis sometimes:

🌍🧑‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

I grew up with the emoticons (thats what the text based ones are called? Like :D :P etc?). I never learned to use emojis. I remember when some services and platforms started to bring them on, there was options to turn them off, so I did that. Not sure why, but I did. This was in… 2005? Something like that. Since then I just never bothered to learn to use them. Some services you have to do the :word: thing to get a specific one, some services you need to scroll through millions of them to find the one you are looking for. I can express myself well enough with the text based ones, for me its more work to find a emoji than to just type a couple of characters on the keyboard.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m about tired of emojis. For a while to me, emojis are weaponized by people who post snarky responses and just want to use an emoji as just an indirect snub to add to it. The fun of using them has been ruined from that and people that feel the need to spam fucking a chain of them.

My “I’m being kidnapped, send help” secret code is “I start using emoji”

I like that it’s not much in use here.

I have to think more carefully about what words I type and how to convey my emotions in text. It’s good to practice written communication, and it’s good to be comfortable with it for when you want to be taken more seriously.

And I kinda assume those who splatter their text with emojis are bots or LLMs programmed to sound more human, or people trying to imply or invoke emotions to sell me on some nonsense or other, so I don’t read those comments or posts anyway.

It’s fun that Lemmy has its own culture which comes as a little shock but is easy to adapt to once you figure it out, isn’t it?

it’s just personal preference 🤷‍♀️

I see Lemmy as an older crowd that prefers ASCII emotes. Although the do work in some situations.

Yeah I use them all the time. Very helpful when conveying tone.

Check my post history, I guess. 😅

They’re helpful in providing the proper context to a text-based convo. IRL, you’d just see my face and body language and hear my tone and understand things better so we have to adjust when texting. This is why people feel like they need the “/s” for sarcasm and whatnot. 👍

I tend to only use emoji when texting people I know, not when talking to strangers. Also, I’m on desktop here and so its more effort to use them than its worth IMO 😤

I use them once in a while. Also, I have two in my username.

I noticed you used one in a comment a month ago. Be the change you want to see. 😁