there was no way to look up what those words meant to the person writing them
Comment on Why 🤷♂️ do users 👨💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭?
GooberEar@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
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?
MadBob@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
well yeah if the person writes 😪😔🤥 it’s not clear what they mean, but this poster gave an example sentence that’s pretty unambiguous, and is using the emoji as a tool to make it even more unambiguous, are they not? 🤔
Just feels unfair to lump 🗨💣💨🤳 style emoji usage with “let me put 😆 to make it more clear this is a joke” 🥺 (also sometimes it’s just what the writer is feeling, rather than trying to be clear communication)
GooberEar@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Perhaps. I’m not chewing gum anymore right now.
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The point of the emoji at the end was to “add some more feeling/fun to text content,” like if I ended a comment with “I couldn’t stop smiling while writing this.” It’s irrelevant but it changes the flavor of the text.
Besides that, many lemmy users are on the spectrum and will read “Donald Trump is known for his great border policies” in a comment that it’s clear they’re joking, and they will still have -5 score and comments arguing with them until the poster says “it was a joke.” Compare that to “Donald Trump is known for his great border policies 🤡” or 🙄 or 💀 depending on how obvious you want to be. It’s just a tool that can be misused or annoying like anything else.
GooberEar@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
This actually is a good point and is one of the reasons that overuse of emojis can be annoying for some folks. Basically it boils down to the fact that a lot of people using them don’t use them effectively or in a way that provides any “value” to the reader.
For an otherwise clear and benign statement, a grinning emoji to signify that the writer wants their statement to be “fun” isn’t particularly useful, relevant, nor insightful for the reader. At best, it comes across as unnecessary filler like an ad at the end of a sentence. It makes no difference, it’s just there for the writer’s own pleasure. Nothing wrong with that, but hopefully you can see that it would be annoying for some folks.
On the other hand, using emojis effectively, like putting one after making a sarcastic statement provides insight and meaning to people reading. In other words, it has value for the audience, provides useful context. A lot less annoying to people when they actually derive some benefit from it.
One issue is, a whole lot of people don’t recognize this and/or don’t care.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah but those jeans 😳 Yeah but those jeans 😏 Yeah but those jeans 😍 Yeah but those jeans 🤮