this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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It's only compressing the message visually (it generally uses more data)
Also, at least for me, it takes more work to parse the images than words require. I have to like... shift out of reading mode, comprehend the image and then go back to reading.
How do emoji use more data? They're one, maybe two unicode characters?
And thus more data
Than an entire word?
Take "cactus" for example. Each letter in the word "cactus" is one unicode character, for a total of six. ๐ต is one unicode character, U+1F335.
Unicode characters are 4 bytes long, so "cactus" takes 24 bytes to transmit, where "๐ต" takes 4. Unless something something UTF_8?
You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.
So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5
Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.
So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ๐ตโ. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐ breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".
But that's not what people are doing
They always use a word and an emoji
Yes, to be clear I meant the example I gave where the word was replaced with the emoji was compression, not where they give the word and its emoji. That's as long-handed as possible.