Same here. One morning I came downstairs and found laptops vents working on full. I left it on the table in sleep mode the previous evening. Laptop was extremely hot, luckily there weren't any papers underneath. After that the fans were constantly on full, often the CPU even locked itself on 0.78GHz and needed to be restarted to stop the throttling. They then replaced the mainboard, CPU, but it seems it's still overheating.
I switch between all three major OSs on a regular basis. With so much of our software in the cloud it's not really an issue. The funny thing is that each OS has some apps that you really miss on the other ones. But it's not that onesided and you can be productive on any of them.
This is probably my only gripe with it. I really like static types, since the tools can be so much better in that case. VSCode + ElixirLS is ok, but far from Elm, Typescript or C# in that regard. I've been trying out Dialyzer and Credo, but it all seems so clunky to use.
If you haven't seen the new Dialyzer messages in Dialyxir, I just finished a big effort to improve those messages dramatically for Elixir consumption. Release is in RC currently.
D3 is a joy to use and one of the reasons we've been able to iterate on our product so fast. Once you get over the initial learning curve you can build things really fast and the actual charting part ends up being the easiest to do in the whole process. Processing data, handing interactions end up taking most of your time (I'm speaking this as a developer working on a visualization product https://zebrabi.com/pbi/).
Always interesting to see the divergence between HN and what the average user cares about. For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other. I can't think of another linguistic feature in history which saw such widespread use within a decade and I feel like emojis don't get enough credit for that.
Agreed -- as a Deaf person who uses visual languages to communicate, it's allowed me to actually begin to express myself using a set of pseudo-language visual elements. Some of them roughly map over to ASL expressions; I am looking forward to when they add ASL-specific emoji, or ASL language support, or even hands in the new animoji.
That's.. actually pretty extraordinary. In my cynicism I had imagined the only possible motivation for positioning new emoji as flagship features of their iOS iterations was a blatant attempt to lure pre-teens into a long (and lucrative) journey into Apple's ecosystem. I think perhaps I should take a few steps back and absorb the idea that:
1. people communicate in many different ways and
2. these things aren't valueless just because I don't picture myself using them. And in retrospect, I only struggle to picture myself authoring one; receiving them is completely fine.
I'm really curious about this; thanks for adding this and iluminating so many of us that fail to consider deaf people when thinking about these things.
But I'm not sure I totally understand what Animoji does for you. Your deafness is irrelevant in the context of messaging apps, isn't it? Hearing people, when using Messages, have just writing/reading, just like you.
Is it that, being deaf, you are more used to puting extra emphasis on non-verbal communication, and thus the transition to Messages from "real life" conversation feels more limiting than for us? How is it any better than sending a short video, or may be recording a gif of your actual face? Doesn't the loss in fidelity make it frustratingly hard to express the nuances we get from facial expression?
I tend to think all of those grandiouse statements about "Opening new ways of communicating" or "Creating new connexions between people" are total bullshit. Most animoji users communicate equally well with or without them, it add's nothing except fun. And that's fine! Fun is good.
But it's really hard to put oneself on anyone else's shoes, and I'd love to know if anyone has found more value in animojis.
There's no way to say this without being insensitive, but this reminds me of a grade school joke without a punchline - "how do you write in sign-language?"
Can you help me better understand what ASL language support would look like or what that would mean to you?
I'm not deaf, but as per the GP's comment, I can immediately see animojis with hands performing sign gestures.
If you consider how ingrained and emotionally significant that expressions in your native language are, animojis with hands - which will take that emotional significance and put a cute spin on it - is going to be massive.
ASL (or any language's sign language) isn't a simple translation of gestures for words or letters; the different sign languages have their own grammars and a different "vocabulary". Think of every sign language user as being bilingual, with a sign language and a written language.
ASL is not English. It is an entirely separate visual language with different syntax, lexicon, etc. ASL speakers can communicate to each other over mobile devices using text in the same way that, say, 17th century intellectuals communicated using Latin, or late-dynasty Chinese officials communicated using Classical Chinese.
I do not know how to sign, but I do imagine that a member of the signing community would not feel truly at home in their digital life in that they cannot type the language that they "speak" and very probably think in, but must rather resort to a second auxiliary language whenever they interact with text.
Like, imagine if Apple (or Google or anyone else--this is an industry-wide issue) made it technically impossible for you communicate in anything except French. In this hypothetical world it is not a show stopping issue because you are fully proficient in French having used it in some way nearly every day of your life, and so are all the people you would want to communicate with. But it's not your mother tongue, and so you wouldn't really feel at home or fully included in the digital world, now would you? Texting your family and close friends in French when in fact all your other interactions with them are using spoken English would just be weird.
(Incidentally I do wonder if Swiss German or Scotts speakers feel similarly, and if they don't to what extent that serves as a counter point.)
>(Incidentally I do wonder if Swiss German or Scotts speakers feel similarly, and if they don't to what extent that serves as a counter point.)
I don't know about Swiss German speakers, but Scots speakers tend to be fairly comfortable in code-switching between standard written English and a transliterated form of Scots.
Scottish Twitter is as culturally distinctive as African American Twitter:
Swiss-German sign language is.. interesting. It has Cantonal dialects (I wish I was joking!). I'd really prefer everyone switched to German sign-language for simplicity's sake - in the same way most Swiss-German speakers write High-German instead of dialect.
I could imagine signing emoji being pretty successful. My son is deaf, but too young to be using chat software, so it's difficult to say without asking about at his school.
I would imagine that ASL speakers have usage patterns that they would like to express via text messaging without simply “translating” them into formal written English. That’s no different than why English speakers use emoji (“” instead of “I am happy”) or informal onomatopoeia (“uggh” instead of “I am annoyed”).
If you're not entirely without hearing, you may be interested in knowing that the iOS 12 beta appears to have a new bit of functionality that lets EarPods act as hearing aids.
I suffer from social anxiety. There were a lot of times in the past when I would receive a text and fail to reply because I got stuck trying to figure out how to express myself "correctly". Emojis and the normalization of emoji-heavy texts help me a lot.
I don't mean this to sound in any way cruel or judgemental, but a very large proportion of the population have very limited literacy skills. Emoji are useful for all users who are writing short, personal messages that might be ambiguous in tone. They are extremely useful for people who would otherwise struggle to express or understand tone and emotion using the written word.
In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that.
Here are a couple of example questions from that test.
Only 33% of Americans could describe what is expressed in the following poem:
"The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee -
A clover, any time, to him
Is Aristocracy"
Either a literal or thematic description of the poem constitutes an acceptable answer.
Read the text at the link below. After reading this text, only 16% of Americans could describe the purpose of the Se Habla Español expo.
Acceptable answers include any statement such as the following: "to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community", "to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community" and "to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community".
Did you get the right answer? 84% of Americans didn't. Bear that in mind when you're writing documentation or dialog boxes.
> In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that.
That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, and who is in the figures (a lot of non-English speaking immigrants), usually to try to prove points.
The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at. Over half of China is below basic by the US standard. Over half of Eastern Europe is below the US basic line, including Russia.
In the US ~44% of the below basic population are non-native English speakers, who didn't speak English at all prior to starting school. 39% are Hispanic adults. Ie this group overwhelmingly consists of currently or originally low skill, poor immigrants (people that wouldn't even be allowed into most other developed nations such as Canada).
Demonstrating that effect in action, 43% of hispanic adults test poorly in literacy, compared to about 10% of white adults. Gee, I wonder if immigration into a new culture + language barrier has something to do with these numbers.
Despite a vast immigration flow of low skill, poor, low English literate persons since 1980, the US literacy rate didn't drop meaningfully. That means literacy rates for the base population increased.
Despite all of that, the US is the 7th most literate nation on earth, in front of: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel, South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Russia.
> The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at
Americans are well educated relative to the global population. That isn't what we're discussing. OP is explaining why large swaths of the population might prefer communicating with pictures over words. It isn't that they can't understand words. Just that parsing and constructing language to express complex thoughts isn't a common experience for many, for whatever reason. Emojis fill that gap.
My comment was not intended as a critique of the American education system. Immigrants buy phones and computers. They run businesses and use SaaS products. Non-native English speakers are an important demographic that we need to keep in mind when we are designing products and writing documentation.
In a globalised world, a great many people are frequently communicating in a language that they have not fully mastered. South Africa has eleven official languages. India has 22. Globally, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers by two-to-one. Hindi/Urdu has a roughly equal number of first and second language users.
What's the proper set of answer about the Dickenson passage? Does any interpretation count as correct?
(I know this thread isn't about the methodology of literacy assessment, but now I'm really curious to know how they do it. Does publicly available question-level response data exist somewhere out there? from previous years?)
I would be interested to find out if things were that bad in the 50s or 70s. It does feel like the intro of the movie Idiocracy is happening. Even among sophisticated people, when you watch interviews or speeches of public figures from the 30s or 50s, their spoken English (but it applies to other western languages too, French for sure) was so much superior than even your typical written newspaper article today. Trump’s speeches made out of no more than a 100 distinct words are merely a dent in a downward curve.
"Whole new way" is a bit hyperbolic, but an emoji definitely brings layers of meaning that are normally only feasible in in-person conversation into the written realm. It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy.
It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don't have to explain why you approve or add your own commentary, you just indicate your approval. And if you write a comment on a thread, there's a certain expectation that it contain an original thought or that it demands a response. So reactions manage to avoid a lot of inane filler.
For a good illustration, watch a thread on Facebook where they say "type AMEN if you agree!" and you get a thousand people tediously writing it out. If there were just a little prayer emoji and a counter, you get closer to their actual intent, since that's literally what "amen" means.
1) The emoji has several possible interpretations/meanings depending on context, such as "I don't know", "I don't care", "indifference" or "shrug". There's this saying, "a picture says a thousand words". It applies here (nobody said the words couldn't be a few words in hundreds of different languages ;)).
2) The emoji generally does not require translation to different languages. It isn't universal, but its more accessible, and some emojis are certainly universal (such as :) which is a facial expression my 3 month old understands).
> emoji generally does not require translation to different languages
Really good point. I don't find watching a keynote speeches about emoji at all exciting, either. But I work on a mixed-language engineering team with a lot of (extremely smart, highly literate) people, and we use emoji all the time.
Whether it's cold-sweat-face or thinking-face really helps me understand the nuance of my colleague's Japanese comments (which, btw, as a native English speaker with only fair Japanese ability, gives me a free opportunity to experience 'basic or lower literacy').
I know that adding emoji characters helps them in the same way, so I use them frequently.
> It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can use.
What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.
There are a lot more emoticons than a few simple faces. Even your example ("¯\_(ツ)_/¯") is an emoticon, albeit one from the Asian side of the pond. I've had long distance relationships over text chat and so I really disagree on the fact that they are limited in their expressiveness.
Part of what is off-putting about emoji is that they make text look like early first-language reading materials, where pictures of objects are embedded next to the word you are meant to learn. It's kind of off-putting to read, at least for those of us who grew up in that experience.
I also do not share your adoration for things that are super instantly accessible. There is much value in learning, and in struggling along the path to learning, that people think they don't want or need. Linguistic training (like learning to read written words) is a necessary skill for assimilating oneself to a new culture or in-group and language is one of the best methods for practicing that.
Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
> I also do not share your adoration for things that are super instantly accessible. There is much value in learning, and in struggling along the path to learning, that people think they don't want or need. Linguistic training (like learning to read written words) is a necessary skill for assimilating oneself to a new culture or in-group and language is one of the best methods for practicing that.
At its core, language is a tool. Its job is to allow people to communicate ideas with other people. You're arguing that there's value in not making a tool easier to use because it promotes learning, but I disagree with that point. Sure, there's value in overcoming challenges to benefit learning, but we shouldn't create artificial challenges (like not using emojis) just for that benefit to learning by doing things in a harder way. It's like saying we should use hammers to put in screws because using a screwdriver makes things too easy. I agree that there's much value in learning, but I think learning can be done in a much more efficient and productive way than by refraining from using emojis.
Also, you have to think of the costs associated with the inefficiencies of human language. One example: look at all the scientific work being done in English. Anyone that doesn't speak English fluently is automatically at a massive disadvantage in the scientific field. These non-English speaking scientists have to spend years simply learning English to contribute their work. That's an opportunity cost. All those years could have been spent on their actual scientific work, and those individuals and society as a whole have to live with that loss. I'm obviously not arguing that emojis fix this problem, but I'm saying that simplifying our language tool in some way could.
> Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
That's an interesting point. There are differences in how emojis are interpreted, but this is no different from written or spoken language. Since the beginning of human communication, people have developed slang words and altered the rules of language. Some of these changes have spread and persisted while others died out or remained in use within specific groups of people. While the peach and eggplant emoji may not have the same interpretations across age groups, different cultures can likely still infer their meaning. For example, the see/hear/say-no-evil monkey emojis likely transcend many cultural and language barriers. Knife + scream + shower head emojis likely convey the shower scene from Psycho to anyone who's seen the movie regardless of culture or language.
> Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean
Emojis do as well. As someone who has autism, I don't recognize or understand facial expressions all the time. I remember being 18 years old and finally understand what faceroll/roll eyes meant (thanks to -what it was called then- an emoticon).
AIM/ICQ already had picture-smiley support, converting :) to a smiley. The first smileys on the internet were used in the start of 80's (they're apparently used in written form as well see [1]). It was used on IRC and e-mail.
Another fun fact of that time (80s) is that domain names and TLDs used to be written in CAPITAL LETTERS. And the first spam was from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).
Acronyms are very old (widely used), and useful, but that doesn't mean they're better because they're older or more used in the past. Remember that reading in past centuries wasn't for everyone, same for latin. Acronyms are language specific which emoticons/emoji are not. The acronym LOL, one of the first chat-specific acronyms, stems from IRC and is believed to be coming from Dutch (The Dutch word lol means "fun" or [non-sexual] "pleasure". The Dutch were one of the very first if not the first countries to connect to the USA internet, and same for its IRC presence.) If you're a native English speaker you may not give a rat about acronyms being English-centric, but for the rest of the world they often don't even know what the acronyms stand for or they have their local acronyms which you or me wouldn't grasp.
Emoticons and emojis do not suffer from that problem. Case in point, the red 100 emoji is widely popular in the USA (so I heard). People don't use it here in NL. But we understand what an American would mean with it.
I believe picture language (as I call it) plus on-the-fly translation devices (what Google Glass could've been ages ago but didn't work out due to public outcry) is going to solve communication in the 21st century. The effect of the tower of Babel shall be mitigated. Why are my glasses still dumb? All these brands being sold here, are ultimately owned by the same big fat multinational. There's a huge opportunity here.
A major part of human communication happens through facial expressions. Emojis/Animojis enable this for digital communication. It's new in the sense that we now have a global set of symbols for these expressions.
It's hard to say how to express that, since I have absolutely no idea what it means :) If I got that message I would be pretty confused. Is the other option literal nail-painting or is it just sarcasm?
The nail-painting one can be used to be a bit ‘sassy’, so it’s like saying “don’t worry, I know other ways to find myself a bed for the night ;-)” but in a more nuanced way that I at least find funnier.
It’s probably not a universal meaning but my point is that emojis can be used to express more than just basic emoticon ‘UNIVERSAL EXPRESSION OF HUMAN HAPPINESS’ style things.
This may or may not be an example of it -- for all I know it's a commonly used one with a well-established metaphoric meaning --, but I think emoji usage is strangely idiosyncratic.
I did too. Perhaps if emoji are such an ambiguous method of communication, they aren't so good after all?
That isn't an isolated instance of emoji confusion for me, either. Apart from the basic facial expression emoji, for me they're a great way of making a sentence more confusing.
Very curious - what do you think makes the image version superior to the text-based smiley?
And as a follow-on, do you think the animated and personalized versions of these emojis make it that much more effective?
For me, the text version communicates the same meaning and context, so it’s fascinating to see examples where the representational medium has a significant impact.
This smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes is one of the few emoji that cause an automatic emotional response inside me. Another is https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face/ (Apple rendition of both, particularly).
Text, and ASCII emoticons, just don't do that.
(and I'm guessing that after I see enough "we can save you money on your car insurance :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: manipulative overuse by marketing "humans", emojis won't do it anymore either).
(Although, do you genuinely think a photo of a cat being cute is emotionally the same and just as effective as a description of a cat being cute?)
There’s a whole range of “smiling face” emoji with slightly different smiles, and slightly different eye expressions, some blushing, some not. In the context of “i have all these options to choose from”, choosing that one particular option conveys more information than what the text-based alternative provides
Sometimes I'd like to think that it prevents misunderstandings. But that's probably very subjective.
I'd also guess that just because they feature it heavily on the keynote that a huge team spent the whole year only working on just Emojis. That doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of other teams doing important ground work and internal improvements that are not that easy to showcase on a keynote for a very diverse audience and press.
I suspect some people have either never heard of emoji - could be old or young, not sure - or simply didn't think they would use it before these kinds of features came along. Outside of Apple nerd (and broader HN) social circles, the awareness of this is probably much smaller than we realize.
After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
It amuses me to think we have moved from the printed word back to hieroglyphs (emoji). Not in a derogatory way, communication is communication, but in a awe of older cultures. I like the thought experiment of imagining a fallen advanced civilization in Egypt. I imagine them stuck... watching their batteries drop to 0%, and turning to stone and emoji as the only way to persist communication.
What if printed words were really just a transitional state of language until their purest form, emoji!
To a certain extent, one could consider Chinese characters to be more like emoji than words constructed via a phonetic alphabet, in which case there never really was a transition period, just some backwater outliers.
That idea was dismissed several thousand years ago, and for good reason. Text is way more powerful and precise than pictures. And I'm not saying having both is a bad thing, but this focus on Emojis is just idiotic.
Text accompanied by images has been a staple of modern visual communication for the past several hundred years. Emojis just bring additional ways to express oneself in addition to plain text.
When I chat with my Thai girlfriend, many miles away, we usually use the LINE app. We don't directly use emoji's, but we do use stickers [0] as part of our chat. And I feel stickers provide much the same use as emojis, the can more easily be used to convey emotions in a chat that would otherwise be harder to interpret correctly.
> I can't think of another linguistic feature in history
Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak.
> Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings.
There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.
> For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other
Emojis I agree, they are standardized and their meaning is clear by convention. Animojis? That's just salespeak for snapchat-like filters. They're funny but the novelty wears off the same day.
> For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other
Wow that is an extremely generous characterization. At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
Well, for starters, you don't have to turn your head 90º to resolve some, but not all of them as an image, as you do with your provided examples. They're also much higher-resolution so it's easier to pull meaning from an unfamiliar one.
> Well, for starters, you don't have to turn your head 90º to resolve some, but not all of them as an image
Well, no one actually does, so I'm glad we got out ahead of that problem.
> They're also much higher-resolution so it's easier to pull meaning from an unfamiliar one.
except you don't really need that many. There are a few common emotions that people use... and then there are winky T-Rex emoji's that are completely unnecessary.
I feel like you and others are being purposefully obtuse, to some degree.
Can you seriously not distinguish between the tiny selection and low res quality of text faces, and the wide variety of highly specific and detailed set of reactions now available to us? There's only so much you can do with text before you have to be extremely creative (a level of effort excessive for quick casual conversations) or rely on the other party being familiar with your specific vocabulary of text-faces.
>Can you seriously not distinguish between the tiny selection and low res quality of text faces, and the wide variety of highly specific and detailed set of reactions now available to us? There's only so much you can do with text before you have to be extremely creative (a level of effort excessive for quick casual conversations) or rely on the other party being familiar with your specific vocabulary of text-face
Then give us a single example! So many replies _and not a single example of where words or ascii fail to impart what only an emoji can_. You can say "they're obviously better" until you're blue in the face, but it's all hot air until you prove it.
> and not a single example of where words or ascii fail to impart what only an emoji can
Obviously words can (almost certainly) impart what an emoji can - but one small image versus maybe 100 words? That's before you start combining them and the expanded meaning you can get from that.
You might as well say "give me an example of where Proper English fails to import what only slang can" - you're missing the point.
Not the OP but here’s one. I recently got divorced and back into dating. These days, that means a lot of texting in some form, and I’ve found I have a distinctive style that people who know me well enjoy but that tends to produce a lot of misunderstandings with people That don’t know me that well.
I have the choice of either adjusting my writing style to new people, which I’d rather not, or use either text or picture emoji to convey the tone that makes my writing clearer to people who can’t infer it. I find that image-based emoji are much more specific in the mood they convey, and provide more range — and there is a definite difference in how clearly I come across.
> Let me put it another way: what’s the point of these newfangled moving pictures when we already have books?
Yeah, figured that would be trotted out at some point. That's a fine sounding argument, but do you really feel emoji's are on the same level as the advent of video? I don't believe you do. At some point you have to take a look at the specific thing you're talking about and get down out of the clouds.
I have yet to hear a reasonable argument as to why emoji's are better. All I see here is "they're different and can be funny." Ok.
Am I not allowed to disagree with a statement that implies emojis are some groundbreaking form of communication? I never said the concept was not useful; I said that images provide nothing text cannot aside from aesthetics. Why are you people so defensive about this?
Because you have observed that emojis do not help you communicate, and then concluded that emojis cannot possibly help anyone communicate. There are lots of people in this thread who have mentioned concrete examples of emojis "providing something text cannot," and yet you refuse to accept it.
"This helps me communicate" is not a falsifiable claim. You're telling lots of people that they have somehow made a mistake in interpreting their own life experiences. You are not even considering the possibility that something is there, and you just can't see it.
They are an improvement to an existing form of communication. Aesthetics are also a form of communication. Emojis can be used as part of a sentence and there is no way to communicate exactly the same thing without using them.
There has never been a way to put images in a sentence as easy and expressive as emoji (all there used to be was fonts like Wingdings), and it’s standardized. That is quite revolutionary.
The fact that they’re wildly popular should provide some indication that the qualities exist.
Communication is rife with ambiguities, emotion, shortcuts, and mistakes. And between people who share friendship or more personal relationships, those “flaws” are often features, not bugs.
The concept of emoji, I feel, embraces those flaws.
(And personally speaking on the subject of emoji vs common text shorthand, if I never see “lol” again it’ll be too soon.)
> (And personally speaking on the subject of emoji vs common text shorthand, if I never see “lol” again it’ll be too soon.)
Funny, I feel the same way about emoji. I dunno, maybe I'm too autistic to get it, but when people use emoji it makes me feel like I'm talking to a child who hasn't learned express themselves like an adult yet.
> The fact that they’re wildly popular should provide some indication that the qualities exist.
Really?
Pet rocks were wildly popular. Unhealthy foods are wildly popular. Cocaine is wildly popular (well maybe that's a stretch).
I think there's a correlation problem here. However, I think you're missing the point again; _what can I convey via an emoji that I cannot convey in ascii_? I have yet to see a single example, and that's what started the entire debate.
Pet rocks were popular for 5 minutes. Unhealthy foods are perpetually popular because they have the quality of tasting wonderful.
And neither of you tried to address the core argument I made in the parent, that emoji reflect the inherent messiness of personal communications and for that matter personal relationships.
The same reason it’s important (but inefficient) to tell someone you love them in nonverbal ways is the reason emoji are popular. We all appreciate communications that extend beyond the written word. Emoji is just another option among many for achieving that.
>And neither of you tried to address the core argument I made in the parent, that emoji reflect the inherent messiness of personal communications and for that matter personal relationships
And exactly zero people, including yourself, have been able to provide a single gle example where text fails to convey what an icon can. And, you, that was the entire subject of this discussion if you haven't noticed.
> I have no idea what concept is even meant to be communicated by such an absurd thing
Depends on context. If we were discussing someone, it might signal criticism or a desire to party. The fact that it cannot compress losslessly into words is the whole point.
I'd like to see examples of both of these. Specifically how the T-Rex plays a role because, if you take the T-Rex out, we're back to something I can easily convey in ascii.
> if you take the T-Rex out, we're back to something I can easily convey in ascii
May I ask if you read fiction in more than one language? There are constructions even in those close to English which I find impossible to accurately translate in a way that preserves the delight of the interaction between their phrasing and underlying meaning.
For T-Rex, two examples:
"I drank too much at the Christmas party.
Not as much as Bob. He puked in the restaurant sink before appetizers were served.
[Dancing eye-rolling T-Rex]"
--or--
"Let's go.
Where?
BarBar.
BarBar?
Happy hour pricing until midnight.
[Dancing eyes-rolled-back T-Rex]"
In the former, the emoji communicates derision. In the latter, playfulness. Depending on the style of animation and context, the emoji could further communicate cuteness versus tactile incompetence, letting go versus a loss of control, subject versus object.
The process of decoding an emoji is analogous to a simplified form of interpreting art. Why is that there? Am I supposed to interpret it using the positive or negative connotation? In some cases, less ambiguity is desired. But in others, the ambiguity itself carries information of a sort impossible to parse into words.
If it is contextual and subjective, then we could just use any word or phrase in the same manner to the same effect. Written language itself is just contextual line patterns.
Very likely less than the amount of different native language speakers who understand the vast majority of your emoticons/emojis.
I suppose you don't care cause you just speak your native language with other people who are native speakers. But a universal language on top of that has huge benefits in international circles. And, my 3 month old understands the :) smile. One of the very first abilities a newborn learns is recognizing faces. That's when they cannot even see a meter far!
So let me get this straight: emoji is both highly contextual and simultaneously universal?
I find that difficult to believe. On the other hand, given enough time and global interaction in that medium, it could develop a stable enough meaning across a large enough conceptual space to have a situation no worse than exists between any "standard" language and its various dialects. That'd be interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
> So let me get this straight: emoji is both highly contextual and simultaneously universal?
Well, not always universal. Some are generally well understood. They're easy to learn (you might wanna also look into where to start if you're interested in learning many languages; I understood its best to start with an Asian language such as Japanese/Korean/Chinese), and on top of that even allow to learn languages easily (see Memrise and Duolingo who use SVG art to teach languages. They use the same SVG art in different languages!). Even on school when children learn their first words (which are in Dutch: boom/roos/vis/vuur, English meaning: tree/rose/fish/fire) this is done via pictures!
Emoticons and emoji are contextual, yes.
If I say:
That's fun ;) :)
That has a different meaning than:
That is fun :)
or
That is fun ;)
Different context, yet a wink or smile is universal.
And if I'd write:
Dat is leuk :)
You wouldn't understand it because you don't speak Dutch. But you would understand the smiley. Without using any translator. The emoticon & emoji always describes the text around it, like an adjective (though it could also describe other smileys). As such, it is descriptive.
True, sometimes the emoticons (and especially emoji) explanation must be explained. Once it is explained, it can be used in combination with any language. For example, the kappa emoji [1] which originates from Twitch can be used on an English stream, but also on a Spanish or Japanese one. Its generally understood within the gamer community, but if you'd start using it within your local hockey club they'd first need to understand the meaning.
> That is fun ;)
>
> Different context, yet a wink or smile is universal.
Really? Because I can't see any real difference between any of those examples. Does the wink mean you're being sarcastic? Or that you're coming on to me? What purpose does the smiley serve? you already said it was fun, one could presume that would leave you in a positive emotional state.
> the kappa emoji [1] which originates from Twitch can be used on an English stream
I hate those stupid things so much, probably because I have no context for understanding their meaning and, since its already an english stream, you could just use words! And if you're not speaking the same language as the rest of the stream, you can't express anything meaningful enough to be worth saying anyway.
> Really? Because I can't see any real difference between any of those examples. Does the wink mean you're being sarcastic? Or that you're coming on to me? What purpose does the smiley serve? you already said it was fun, one could presume that would leave you in a positive emotional state.
That'd depend on the rest of the text. It could mean I am making a joke ("not serious" / "just kidding"). It could mean I'm sarcastic. It could mean that I'm trying to hit on you. I think that sums it up (though I'm open for different explanations).
Thing is, back in the days, even in native languages between native speakers (but more so with one or more non-native) sarcasm and jokes weren't always easy to detect. The wink smiley specifically filled that niche! If you don't know about the story behind it, you might find it interesting to look it up.
As for the difference between these, "That is fun :)" denotes no sarcasm, but warmth. Possibly still humor, but its a genuine statement. "That is fun ;)" was covered earlier above and "That is fun ;) :)" is a mixed bag which could go either way (possibly clever to "talk your way out of the meaning" e.g. when trying to flirt but its not well received, or to create some -albeit simple- mysticism around your flirt). That's without knowing the context. The context still matters and is, ultimately, decisive for the meaning.
I have autism, btw, so although I find this fascinating it is rather difficult for me to understand. It took me serious effort to learn the meaning of the different emoticons/emoji (as far as one can know them, since there's so many in unicode these days).
> I hate those stupid things so much, probably because I have no context for understanding their meaning and, since its already an english stream, you could just use words! And if you're not speaking the same language as the rest of the stream, you can't express anything meaningful enough to be worth saying anyway.
(I don't like it either but that's because it is overused in these circles, and it reminds me of my age ie. that I'm not youth anymore.)
The ability to understand a language isn't binary. (See e.g. the example of the wink where language is not being understood!)
Another example coming from my own is I understand some Spanish, some French, some and some German, but I do not want to learn any French or Portuguese, and my German is better than my Spanish but I'm very curious to learn more Spanish. My English is pretty good, as is my Dutch, but I'm only interested in learning more English and Spanish; Dutch not so much. YMMV obviously.
> we could just use any word or phrase in the same manner to the same effect. Written language itself is just contextual line patterns
No, we can't. There is an inherent visual component to emojis. A picture worth a thousand words, et cetera.
It's not an abstract idea mapping to an arbitrary icon; without prior explanation, many emojis make sense (within a certain cultural context). Kind of like how we can't replace the essence of giving a friend a gift or a lover a flower with words or an arbitrary icon. Apple understands this in a way few technology companies do.
> It's not an abstract idea mapping to an arbitrary icon; without prior explanation, many emojis make sense (within a certain cultural context).
What a coincidence, the exact same thing is true about written words.
>Kind of like how we can't replace the essence of giving a friend a gift or a lover a flower with words or an arbitrary icon. Apple understands this in a way few technology companies do.
I feel like you're one of those people who would have been way into flaming guitar gifs and midi on your geocities page in the 90s. I mean, seriously? You're literally saying that sending a gif conveys so much more meaning meaning it is similar to giving a gift or a flower than sending a text.
> More challenging: what’s the text version of a singing, eye-rolling T-Rex?
Who cares because that's dumb? Can you tell me what deep emotional state is being conveyed by a T-rex rolling its eyes? I think you lost track of the premise we're debating.
> At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :(
Do you really think this?
I don't really 'get' emojis but I think you're woefully underestimating their impact on communication and language. The emoji library on a normal iPhone is enormous.
>you're woefully underestimating their impact on communication and language. The emoji library on a normal iPhone is enormous
What does one have to do with the other? Yes, there are a lot of dumb icons to chose from. How does that directly lead to "[having a] large impact on communication and language"? If that's true, do you think it's a _positive_ impact?
Have you ever encountered difficulty conveying or understanding conversational tone over the internet? No? You are lying or lack self-awareness. Voice and body language are important for disambiguating sentences with more than one possible meaning or implication. Emojis approximate the role of voice tone and body language in digital text-based communication.
The discussion is not "are emojis in any form useful?", it's "do icons provide a new and before unrealized form of communication". Literally every person here missed the statement in the first comment.
You didn't read. I said that you can convey any of these equally well in ascii. Yes, it's handy to be able to plug an :) at the end of a sentence which may otherwise sound rude/overly direct. That doesn't mean I need 1000 icons, and _that's what we're talking about_.
The emojis serve a purpose. Text doesn't serve that purpose. I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. They're not a stand-in for emoticons.
You don't get it. It's okay. Not everything is for you.
>I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. They're not a stand-in for emoticons.
So you can't explain it, but it's I who "doesn't get it". Ok then. I'll excuse you for a bit as it's going to take some time to untwist your brain from that logical contortion.
The meaning is immediately clear to anyone familiar with the reference. It's basically a pictographic language that leans heavily on a shared culture that's largely internet-based.
Ah, I get it, it's value is making the people use it feel special because only "the right kind of people" will get their jokes. Just a new generation of children using slang. Why was that so difficult to use words to describe?
>> "Ah, I get it, it's value is making the people use it feel special because only "the right kind of people" will get their jokes. Just a new generation of children using slang."
You sure do have some text there.
>> "Why was that so difficult to use words to describe?"
Do you similarly disdain things like Cockney Rhyming Slang and Polari because they're effectively "inside jokes" that express things you could equally well express with "plain words"?
I feel like I'm in the Twilight zone (and no, I don't hang out with a lot of 12 year olds, but I do in fact know that kids like to pepper near everything they write with dumb icons.)
The debate is not "are emojis widely used". Yes, of course they are. The question is "opened a whole new way to communicate with each other", which is what I responded to.
I say, no, they haven't. I can convey the same emotions with ascii. I can convey the same emotions with written text. If you want to prove me wrong then fine, but don't re-frame the discussion.
The most common emoji I see among kids is (Face With Tears of Joy) or (OK Hand) (apparently ycombinator doesn't support UTF-8). I don't know of any ascii that can do those. (FYI, I'm 28 and I often chat with my younger cousins who are in their mid-teens at the moment.)
Ok well here's what I actually said. It's right up there if you want to take another look.
> At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
Never did I say "These are dumb get off my lawn!" I said they don't meaningfully impact or improve communication, which is in direct response to the person I replied to who said that they have "opened a whole new way to communicate."
That's a serious claim, I'd like to see a single coherent argument to show it's actually the case. But, no, all I get are mischaracterizations of what I said.
The debate is not "are pretty things nice", it's "have emoji's fundamentally improved communication".
I think the new Facetime features are gamechangers in terms of driving usage. All this stuff was already available in Snapchat etc. but Snap's problem is that the impressive AR stuff they were doing 3 years ago is now built into the OS.
Allowing people to call each other as avatars complete with facial expressions or with flattering filters applied gets rid of one of the last remaining key barriers to mass video calling adoption: people tend to look like hell in low light on front-facing cameras. Teenagers will upgrade to Face ID just to get these features, grandkids will love calling their grandparents as cartoon tigers and grandparents will love responding as cartoon dinosaurs.
Also nice to see the fruits of the Workflow acquisition, this will allow people to do all sorts of customisations including using slang and profanity to trigger commands. "Hey Siri, order my favourite fucking pizza".
It's fun to develop it - computer vision, facial features detection, 3D mesh deformation - I programmed all those parts for another unrelated app and it was total fun. Not that it was useful or something, but I enjoyed it a lot.
I tolerate emoji (though don't use them myself) but I always get upset at the acceptance rate of new emoji compared to the historical acceptance rate of actual characters that are used in actual written languages by the unicode stewards.
There is an eye opening, amazing discussion about emojis going on here. But, like really aren't we just all accepting of the nuances of a cartoon based language? I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but that is reality. We're sending forest gump like 'shit happens' cartoons to one another.
I second this, gets more popular every year. The puzzles are well thought out. They get progressively more involved each day, it’s definite worth a try
