this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy

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I'm a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you'll get an idea of the face I'm making, so less chance of misunderstanding

I noticed that every time I add an emoji to a comment it gets downvoted, so I tested my theory, wrote a comment without an emoji, got upvotes, went back and added an emoji, got downvotes..

On Reddit people use emojis a lot, on Lemmy I NEVER saw anyone use emojis, my account is new but still for the time I spent here, I never saw the use of emojis

So, is it just me, have you noticed this small detail ? and do you miss emojis the way I do ? ๐Ÿ˜ญ

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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Emojis are a waste to me, my eyesight is not good enough to differentiate whatever the fuck they are supposed to be saying. I don't like to throw around "ists" and "isms" but some people really do have accessibility issues, and emojis are not helpful at all. Too many of them are only reflecting inside jokes and elitism.

Use language, that is what it is there for.

[โ€“] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Use language, that is what it is there for.

top-use-words

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Huh, that's an interesting point that I never thought of before.

Do you think there would be a way to make them easier to differentiate that would make them more useful, or do you think there's a fundamental problem with using them?

I'm thinking of workarounds like making emoji SVG to scale to whatever size you need.

Or maybe an optional setting to insert text after an emoji for users that want it. Example:

๐Ÿ˜Š (Smiling face)

What do you think?

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Huh, that's an interesting point that I never thought of before.

Yeah, I have found that accessibility issues are mostly treated like a joke in the tech industry. I would raise it as a QA issue and nothing would be done.

The text would certainly be helpful for the vision impaired, but if text would do it, why use emojis in the first place? Same issue with vague icons, you need a text alternative for usability.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I was thinking of the inserted text as a user-side thing. If someone sends you an emoji, your software inserts the name of the emoji next to it for the benefit of the user. That kind of thing.