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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

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Emoji being associated with infancy is a thing that only exists in your brain and only because young people were early adopters of emoji about 15 years ago. Emoji are just as valid a means of communication as any other.

It's definitey not only in their brain, it's in my brain, too.

On a related note: Emoticon > Emoji.

Bring back B~), get rid of those silly newfangled unicode monstrosities.

Element and discord and the Samsung default keyboard try to :coloncode: any emoticons you type.

This is on desktop and mobile, since the two apps are electron.

\>. <

Good thing I don't use Element as my Matrix preferred client. Discord and all Samsung software are more or less indistinguishable from spyware the way I see it, as most closed-source proprietary software is. That's a major if not primary reason why it's closed source: it's doing naughty stuff against the interests of the user that the developers want to conceal from their victims.

It doesn't matter how many other people prefer to throw their own privacy off a cliff, irrational and self-harming group conformity concerns don't afflict me the way they seem to afflict neurotypical people. One of the blessings of being on the spectrum.

The point is that for the typical older HN denizen, emojis were legitimately a sort of counterculture element associated with trivial conversations in the counterculture of our youth.

That's not what they are anymore. They have a rich meaning - ask a young person what :) means and you'll have your example.

Emojis are, like it or not, part of the lexicon now.

You can use whatever dialect of language that you want. I'll keep using the same as the people commenting above, which doesn't include emojis.

>typical older HN denizen, emojis were legitimately a sort of counterculture element associated with trivial conversations in the counterculture of our youth.

Emojis didn't exist in the youth of the typical older HN denizen. They are the exclusive purview of Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and younger millennials.

Huh? Emojis have existed since BBSs

It is a button that let's people say "me too". It really doesn't matter if it is labeled with a thumbs-up emoji, the text "me too" or Rick Astley dancing. Don't think you are better than others because you are too "proud" to click a button with a thumbs up image on it.

but in a way that's easily ignorable, for convenience.

I think emojis are easily overused, but I certainly don't mind when they're used to convey simple, universally understood meaning (such as reacting with a "me too" in a bug report).

Stuff like gitmoji, though, drive me nuts. Talk about ambiguous and easily misused. Faster for everyone if you just say what you mean.

Maybe then GitHub should add a text-based expression for people like you.

Like Google does in Gmail, where you can turn off the icons for the "archive", "report spam" actions so that the text is shown instead.

I'm sure this would add a lot of value to GitHub /s

Or you ask your OS vendor (or each website operator) to also ship an optional set of emoticons with less childish images. Start a petition and I'll sign it.

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