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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

Some food for thought, the younger segment of the online neurodivergent community has come up with a solution to this problem: "tone indicators"[1]. They are semifrequently seen in the art spaces I hang out in. If you've seen "/s" on Reddit, you've probably seen a tone indicator.

[1]: https://toneindicators.carrd.co/

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I've never heard of "tone indicators" before, but I've seen the usage of "/s" for a long time to indicate sarcasm, possibly as early as the 90s.

It was extremely frequently used on IRC back then

Emojis as well, though they were pure ASCII, not the emoticons of today

the ASCII faces are the emoticons, emoji means "picture character" and includes all the UTF8 cartoons.

both terms were coined after UTF-8 and after people started to replace the character strings like :) with pictures.

emojis are technically the UTF-8 style emoticons, so you do have a point that i shouldn't call ascii style emoticons this, but its really a redundant distinction in my opinion. Especially as the term emoticon also applies to emojis/picture representations of ascii-style emoticons.

Unicode indeed has an emoticon block (referring to emojis with facial expression) but the term actually predates the very UTF-8 itself going back to early 80s. Emoji also predates its Unicode introduction originating from Japan in late 90s.

what source do you have that the term 'emoticon' was coined in the 80th?

As far as I know, the term was coined in the 90th. Please take note that i've - from the start, talked about the term, not the usage of punctuation to show faces

Here's a reference to the term from 1987:

https://archive.org/details/ParalanguageInElectronicMail-ACa...

> https://toneindicators.carrd.co/

Wow, they're actually using the term 'masterlist'. I'm pretty triggered right now. /s

ikr should be 'mainlist'

Wow, I never knew there was a whole list of these! I love this, they are very clear. Usually searching through emoji I'll pick one purely based on how it looks and not realizing it really has a different meaning than I intended.

For instance, I've used the 'sad-but-relieved-face'[1] emoji before but probably just to convey slightly sad and never to include the relieved part. In fact, I didn't know until I just went searching for emojis just now that it was meant to convey relief.

1. https://emojipedia.org/sad-but-relieved-face/

No /jk? What is this?

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