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Probably because we on Hexbear use them, and we have a lot of them. Let them seethe.
Never been on Hexbear before, eh?
Ask your admins to implement some emojis. We have them on LW, but nobody ever really use them. Just a culture thing I guess.
But that's what custom emojis essentially are, small pictures you can embed into text, just like with Twitch emotes.
they were emojis before we de-forked, what you see now was how mainline lemmy maintainers wanted the custom emoji feature contributed back to their codebase
its funny reddit used to be extremely anti emoji, there's something about them being feminine coded, something about real men using real words, big manly words, the bigger and the more the manlier, utter your inclinations with the utmost exuberance, kind stranger, for I am a maker of quotes! the narwhal bacons at midnight, pippip cheerio
I was not aware that emoji were suddenly socially acceptable on le reddit
i think they mean emojis in general. there was a weird hate for them on reddit in like 2016, probably because of "normies" or something of the like, that still remains in hyper-online communities
People get mad because they see hexbear users having fun with emojis instead of writing a bunch of words to say nothing. I spoiler tag my emojis in other Lemmy's as a result.
spoiler
I am being censored by the emoji/civility cop in my head.
To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds "Sent from my iPhone" to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you've purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of "this is fine" lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.
Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, "Look! That one's sad! I'm sad! These emojis really 'get' me! I'm gonna use them!"
They're expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, "Some is better than none". But I can't shake feeling like I'm being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don't understand how others are satisfied with that.
Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you're using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you're on a platform that doesn't render them the same for every user, you'll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform's walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.
That isn't to say that I hate emojis, or that I don't think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you're using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social "recapturing", taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.
It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there's no joke there. That's just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.
The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform's smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.
Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you've sent, that's successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can't. As long as you're being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn't be able to express yourself.
To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds "Sent from my iPhone" to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you've purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of "this is fine" lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.
Counterpoint: "self-expression" through more consumerist markers is no less bullshit. I don't care about your lifestyle brand and I would, if anything, respect someone more for not paying extra to try to give the affect of being a special little guy when all they are doing is displaying a different flavor of corporate bullshit messaging.
Express yourself in word and deed, not shit you bought.
Your response confuses me.
I agree with everything you said. But I'm not sure which part of what you said is supposed to be a "counterpoint" to what I said...
Imagine giving a fuck about who upvotes or downvotes you on Lemmy ☠️
Just use whatever you feel comfortable with it, I sometimes use emojis, other times simple stuff like :) or other times this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
