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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

OLD MAN OPINION

I grew up using MSN messenger, Me and my friends used to spend way to much time extra viruses to get more emoticons.

However the one thing that stayed with me was how cheap emojis can make things look. Unless its a slack reaction, but they were almost always custom.

So I don't use emojis in a standard day. But I suspect that says more about me, rather than anyone else.

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My old man opinion is that you should probably reconsider as I believe our online arguing has gone way down since we started using emoji in the workplace. Emoji are a useful tool to prevent misunderstanding. Tone, especially aggression, is difficult to express in short text form and so much of short business-oriented messaging looks curt and aggressive.

My old man opinion is that there is no point discussing with people who are using emoji because they are inadequately able to express themselves using words. I have found they are also likely to take offense and act irrationally when words are the forced medium.

You're just being silly(-silly).

Normal communication has probably 1000x the bandwidth of text communication. Any extra bandwidth you can add and not overdo, for written communication, is useful.

I use emojis, maybe one every 500 words or so, and they do offer added value.

By normal, do you mean verbal ?

You sound hostile, try incorporating some emojis.

Nice.

> Emoji are a useful tool to prevent misunderstanding.

...because emoji are widely known for the unambiguous meaning?

The "misunderstanding" part is interesting to me. I've found I don't recognize what most emoji are. If I'm lucky, the site or app has some helpful alt text when I hover over the picture. In my very informal survey, I've asked others what an emoji means and I almost never get the same answer. I suppose the answers are at least in the same general category (or maybe tone?), but I often wonder how clearly both parties really understand what the other is saying. For this reason, I just stick with emoticons as the middle-ground.

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