Asklemmy

No idea, here's a sword

cxxx[::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>

second a few other comments, a lot of people conflating emoticons and emojis

• emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• emoji: 🤷
• emoticon: =>^.^<=
• emoji: 🐱

My hypothesis: Lemmy has an older userbase, and in general older people feel less of a need to express their emotions. They're busier discussing the topic than highlighting their attitude towards it.

Perhaps cultural reinforcement plays a role, too. As emoticons and emojis are less used, they feel more out of place, so people who'd use them elsewhere avoid them here.

For me emoticons were something that started when all of the boomers came to Facebook. Floods and floods of useless emojis left and right. So now I feel weird using them, like I'm cheapening the platform while also acting like the people that ruined Facebook for me

ITT: People conflating emojis and emoticons.

All these people singing the praises of emoticons over emojis, and not a single XD to be seen. I know you're old enough to remember the XD times! XD you cowards!

Emoticons are like swear words.

I use them sparingly not because I disapprove of them, but to preserve their effectiveness.

A lot of us came from reddit where it was considered taboo to use emojis.

I find them obnoxius, just like inserting animated gifs and meme responses. If used in serious context it makes the whole post look cringe, using them to replace words is fit only for smartphone troglodytes sending character-limited posts/SMS.

Everything after ascii art was a mistake. It feels childish to use emoticons, a lot of users here grew up on platforms that only had text and to see emoticons is jarring. Needing to use an image for emotional context is poor writing.

Aside from using them in reactions during discussions with group that I know (Discord, Chat/Hangouts), they're too fuzzy in definition to be useful in conversations. When reading on Lemmy if I run into emoticons, I just skip over them as noise in the stream. I don't even try to figure out what the person is trying to convey since I'm not going to be able to track whatever the latest trends are in their meaning. It's the same reason you don't spam a public forum like this with youth slang if you want to communicate with a wide demographic of members.

I think most oldies are embarrassed by them. I'm not though, but I only surf the world wide web from my phone, so perhaps I'm more hip 😎

We prefer to use our words.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

I don't like to have to press a button, then search for an emoji. Emoticons are faster to write, I mostly use the :), :/, etc.

I changed that in Mastodon, for example. Someone told me that screen readers have trouble reading emoticons, so I mostly use stickers or emojis there.

The yoots make fun of me when I do :(

Usually I only use them when I personally know who I'm talking to. Because who knows how a random person will react to an emoji, misunderstanding their meaning, unintentionally or intentionally.

I also sometimes use them to indicate how casual my post is and should not be taken too seriously.

I'm coming from the old ages of internet where we didn't have them. I'm fine with them, but I'm too old to use them comfortably.

It's fine. Use them if you like, but I don't really see the value in systems such as Discord where you pay money to have special emojis and so on...

well I don't have such a menu for those premade faces, so I just use emoji's instead..., those larger ones take up too much space imo.

I'll use :) , :(, :/, :P, :D, :|, ;) :O, XD... they are nice and compact and get the point across.

you dont even have a pfp

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Because we're adults.

I can use them if I want. 🙂

I just don't feel like it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

🤷

~{●□●}~

I think my Lemmy client does not support emojis, but it supports Lenny faces. Maybe that's why, Lemmy loves Lenny ʕ ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°ʔ

No idea, but if you list social media platforms by use of smilies it would be Instagram > Facebook > YouTube > reddit > Lemmy

There seems to be potential for a correlation with intelligence.