Ask Lemmy

🤷🏽‍♂️

There are no universal rules about this... like pretty much everything, depends on who you're talking to and who you want to make a positive impression on.

Excessive amount of Emojis does seem to read as kinda juvenile, tone-deaf and Instagram-marketey to me at least.

🫪

Emojis are not needed and shouldn't be used.

Now emoticons... 𓁹‿𓁹

It seems to be highly dependant on culture, context and age. I feel like my generation (millennial) uses emoji the least, as we grew up with digital communication but without emoji. I basically use emoji in a similar way to you - sparingly and rarely more than 1 in a message. Younger and older generations both started using digital means of communication when emoji were already established though, and they tend to use them way more in my experience.

In regards to "wrong" interpretation of emoji, they can also have different established meanings for different cultures. 😪 for example is sometimes used to represent having a cold in the west, but in Asia it represents being sleepy (which is its intended meaning). Or 😉, which is considered suggestive/flirty in anglophone countries, but is used for making a lighthearted joke in Germany.

I’m Gen X, so… with punctuation marks. If it auto corrects to an emoji, I hit back to reverse it back to the punctuation marks.

I don’t hate emoji or even other people using them, especially clever uses. I just don’t use them, myself.

I basically use emoji like you.

Reactions: 👍 = okay. ♥️ = thank you/okay/general affinity. 💯 = I agree (mostly used in group chats). 💪, 🔥🎉,🎊, or 💥 = nice work/congratulations. 🥲, 😢, 💔, or 😭 = I got your message, but I don't like it.

Sometimes I will use them to emphasize my own messages. Like I will say "Sorry I can't make it, already have other plans 😭". But the intent here is to indicate that I am disappointed, but don't feel too bad about it. I would never say "Sorry your dog died 😭", because emoji by their nature add too much levity to such a statement.

And then, of course, there are the flirting emoji, 🍑😍😈🔥🤤😏😳😘🥰😍😜🥵🍆💦🚩, which I probably use too much for my own good.

Using multiple emoji in a row is used to indicate emphasis or excitement. So a friend's announcement of an accomplishment in a group thread might earn a 💪💪💪, or a partner's sexy pic might get a 🥵🥵🥵 (followed up with an appropriate text response, of course)

The use of multiple emoji to indicate a thought or feeling is used as a joke, basically making fun of the way boomers use emoji. My favorite example being 🎸🇺🇸🦅, which is also an Always Sunny reference.

I only use a few: 👍🤣🫣🍺

Side note, absolutely hate the fact that "they" are trying to take my thumbs up away. I love it. It's a positive, sincere and humble emoji and people getting annoyed at it are needy little shits.

No, Stacey, you don't get fucking a ❤️. Cutesy BS in return for completing some trivial task that's part of our job is totally unnecessary. My 👍 is genuine, low-key gratitude and acknowledgement and it's the best you're gonna get - if people choose to interpret it as in some way minimizing or passive aggressive then the wider world must be truly abhorrent to them.

i usually only use stuff like :) ^^ -_-;

emojis like 👍 appear broken on some machines, and tbh i don't know how to type them other than copy-pasting from somewhere else..

Any way but the way my damned coding agent uses them

🖕         👨 

   🐛 💤👔🐛 

               ⛽️  👢 

             ⚡️ 8=👊=D💦 

         🎸     🌂 

         👢       👢

My daughters (21 &18) both say emoji’s are cringe and are migrating from majority texts back to voice calls.

I view emoji usage as a personality thing. people are different and will use them differently. its like huggers and non huggers and type A and type B kinda stuff. introverts and outgoing.

Maybe this is just because I'm old but I hate them and avoid using them the super majority of the time.

I would be more okay with them if I had some way of making my device render them like the way Unicode glyphs do. I want my text to stay black and white God damn it.

Using emojis reminds me of all the parents that suddenly spawned on Facebook around 2015. I usually never use emojis other than thumbs up when talking to strangers.

When it comes to close friends on chat, I mostly just combine the cat emoji with hand gestures like 🐱👍, or 🐱👋.

I don't use them at all. I dont' really understand them and I'm fine with that. I have no issue with them being used occasionally either.

I don't understand people who use them all the time, it's bizarre. It also regard it as low-effort.

🙂😂💯 I use plenty, the rest barely ever

I do tend to use the custom emoji reacts feature on Fluxer and Discord quite a bit though, though I'm now limited on what emojis cause there's no way I'm going to pay for Nitro after the bullshit discord pulled

Honestly, I'm waiting for Fluxer to get a mobile app that's not shite then I'll probably move more and more of my things to it

My use of emojis depends on who I’m talking to. If they use it, I use it at the same frequency. If they don’t, I don’t.

I'm old. One of the elder Millennials who grew up on the internet. I stubbornly didn't use emojis in any context for a very long time, but I did use emoticons sparingly =)

Eventually as more people of more diverse generations started using them in conversation with me, I adapted to kind of speak where they were at. Like you I mostly use them as punctuation at the end of a sentence to help clarify intent if I don't think it's clear otherwise. They can help be an indicator like that

Most importantly though, I think we all need to understand that there will never be a really clear consensus on this. We are going to have to learn to communicate with each other where we're at and if you disregard someone solely on the style in which they use emojis you risk disregarding the opinion of some very intelligent people. And I think, personally, you're gonna come off as a bit of a dick about it if you feel the need to post responses telling them so. I can't change your opinions for you but maybe keep that to yourself.

Further notes: I actually include a lot of emojis and ANSI color sequences in my programs and scripts. Drives some people crazy but I find it really helps make some things more readable and draw my attention to things (taking care about what effect this might have on downstream ingestion of course, but most things handle emoji competently these days)

I use them as reactions on platforms that support it. Someone sends a PR and I react with eye emoji for looking at it, checkmark for done, or speech bubble for comments. It takes less space than a full text response. Especially in damned Teams that doesn't have threads in chats, so you can't even group your responses.

That's pretty much it. I don't use them as punctuation and rarely use them in an actual message

On Lemmy? Never.

In instant messages etc, usually to convey things like tone that can't easily come through over text alone. They can also help soften things.

Or as reactions to messages to express something when you don't have much else to say. Or when it'd take time to write your response.