this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
523 points (99.1% liked)
interestingasfuck
9132 readers
639 users here now
For exceptionally interesting content
Rules:
- Posts must be interesting
- Posts must be based in reality
- No hateful content
- No harmful content
- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Emojis are great when you want to convey tone or emotion that you normally can't do through text alone. I find them especially useful when a sentence as-is sounds a lot colder than you actually mean it to be
Obviously not the intention of OP and it's definitely excessive IMO but I do also find that they can be useful markers for longer texts. It gets a lot of hate but I find emojis really useful in codebase READMEs since you can quickly scan through and pick out the bits if information you're looking for
Having grown up chatting with friends and hitting on chicks via MSN messenger, I'm aware. "I'm gonna get you for that ๐ก " and "I'm gonna get you for that ๐ " are two different messages.
I will allege that emoji are badly suited to that task though. First, there are too many emoji. Even just the facial expressions, there are dozens of them. Second, they aren't designed to parse to emotions, they're designed to parse to facial expressions. Many of which are specific to Japanese culture. Third, they're rendered kinda tiny in a lot of fonts. With a font size and screen zoom level set where I can comfortably read text, many emoji are just...yellow circles. Or little blobs of color that I have to bring the screen much closer to my face to make out than the raw text.
Emoticons did the job better with less. But, entropy ruins all.