Reading comments in different communities, I noticed that users hardly leave smilies. Why is that?

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  • vexikron@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Because lemmy users tend to be tech literate millennials or older, who were using the internet before it became a widely popular and used thing.

    We remember a time before emojis. And to us, there is art, and more meaning in continuing the old ways of using textual symbols in clever ways to convey an emotion.

    Emojis are a cop out, a cheap and easy way to do the same, invented for a mass audience that didnt want to do any thinking or be clever in any kind of way and wanted it all handed to them.

    I realize this may sound silly but I will die on this hill: emojis are for children and the technically illiterate, they are an appropriation of a culture spawned by some gen x and mostly millennials when the curious of us forged our own way onto what was at one point in time a frontier of seemingly infinite possibility.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    11 months ago

    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

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
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    11 months ago

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

    • emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • emoji: 🤷
    • emoticon: =>^.^<=
    • emoji: 🐱
    • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      It’s understandable. Back in the old old days, these 😱 were often called emoticons. The reason was that the chat software that people used to automatically replaced ;-) by 😉. The menu was the same and the name of this menu was emoticon.

      One of the most famous example of this is MSN Messenger.

      People keep the habit to call them emoticons.