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Comment by Yiin | Hacker News Reader

"I just got a job offer! "

Unless you've been hired as an astronaut, I fail to see how a rocketship emoji would communicate anything relevant. An exclamation mark (or more than one) is a time-honored way of expressing excitement.

Consider that you failing to see these things is a "you" thing, not a "people are doing it wrong" thing.

Emojis are part of today's written culture because they're so trivially included alongside things being written today. You are fighting a battle that has long ended: they're a feature of communication now. Just like older ASCII emojis, and various other even older nonstandard-standards of comms.

And replying with an exclamation mark, something I've done myself many times, is incredibly ambiguous and not the best example you could come up with here :)

Also, you're kinda talking past each other here in terms of emojis in a message vs emojis as reaction.

Literally nobody I communicate with uses emojis beyond emoticons that have been converted by the software into emojis.

What kind of people do you work with?

Are you, like probably 95% of us on this forum working in tech?

Edit: Yup, you're a techie. Hint: you live in a bubble.

I'm a consultant, I work with all kinds of people. The number one skill required is communication, and learning to communicate with new teams, new people, new companies. All of them have different ways to communicate. Many of them use emojis, not all, but I also work with lots of different countries.

I also do quite a bit of work in the gaming community which has its own custom emoji culture, a different beast altogether.

People communicate outside of work; a heart to a loved one, my dad using a car emoji in the family group chat to indicate he is driving home from work, a thumbs-up when someone in a friend group suggest going to a movie

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