Tildes is not anti emoji.

I use them in comments quite a bit. But I wouldn't put one on a title. I assume that is very much Tildes' stance on the matter.

I prefer text emoji and even have the shrug on text expansion in the computer. If I'm on the cell, I use the image ones sometimes.

And yeah I don't really know the difference between smiley, emoji, emoticon, or whatever :P

I think the dislike for emojis really stemmed from people that were railing against others that were (probably) very young.

There's this style.. xD of writing lmao xD that just feels young and just random hahaha..xD

I don't think people dislike a smiley (yeah I still call them smileys) if it's used as a way to convey tone. Just don't overdo it because it distracts ;)

I never use emojis anywhere and just use text smileys -- my most used ones being xD, xd, and :'| all of which convey much more emotion in my opinion then any artwork drawn by google or apple artists. I'm optimistic the tildes community is onboard with these, like everyone was in the early days of the internet.

I’m completely lost by the comments saying that Tildes doesn’t support rendering emoji. Emoji are encoded as text so you can’t really remove support for it short of filtering them out in the processing stage. I wonder if they are running on Linux systems that don’t have good emoji support?

Personally I miss the days of Something Awful and all their custom smilies. People would tell stories and assign each character to a symbol. Made reading a transcript of what was said more fun.

I think everyone performatively hated emojis 7+ years ago (I know I did), since then pretending to care about it one way or the other has become less and less popular.

In the communities I was part of all that time ago it wasn't really about emojis themselves, it was because other people did like emojis. In part it was contrarian and in part it was an excuse to bully people.

Personally I prefer text emojis as they're easier for me to see. I have astigmatism and emoji details can be too small to read sometimes and I have to squint. I ended up customizing my phone keyboard to have these characters for easy access: ∇๐ω⌒∪^●￢-_~=<>:|;/

I don't use them as much as I thought I would, but sometimes they help. I'm glad they're there because I get to make unique faces like:

⌒_⌒
￢⌒￢
๐ω๐
∪⌒∪
^∇^
●๐●
'ω'
@￢@

Sometimes I find what I'm saying needs an unspoken "disclaimer" of sorts. Because it be misconstrued as hostile. One of those silly faces pacifies my words, and also helps people see the human behind the screen, imo.

Tildes or not, no one worth talking with cares about them when used with reason and in moderation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🤷🏻‍♀️

I prefer them way over emoji fwiw, not sure how a website can be anti-emoticons anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I like emoticons and emojis because they help me convey tone in a way that I struggle with through words. Writing things out is awkward and I can't always take, say, happiness and put it into text in a way that's satisfying.

That said, I have an entirely different writing style in forum environments, and I feel that because there's more time and effort put into each post it's less stressful to find the right phrasing.

I think emojis are the equivalent of /s. They're easy ways to show the intent of your writing.

I use them so much in my daily communications, but I do feel a bit awkward using them here in Tildes just because I hardly see anyone doing so. But I remind myself that Tildes isn't anti-emoji, it's anti-assholes 😁

There's nothing against emoji's as a concept on Tildes. But the general sentiment of Tildes is that you want each comment to be meaningful, and emojis tend to be a sign of noise more than a contribution to a discussion. I often use emojis on Discord to "react" to content, but you want to avoid "reacting" on Tildes. That's what the vote button is for, or even the exemplary label if it is a truly insightful contribution.

So while I'm not going to say "never use emoji on Tildes", I can't think of a situation outside of maybe ™️ or ©️ where it would be appropriate. Because I can't bother googling for the Unicode versions of those symbols every time nor remembring a unicode number (I don't even have a numpad on this laptop to make use of such function).

I like emoticons and the text-based stuff myself because that was what I grew up on and often used myself.

When emojis came out, I was in the college phase of "Everyone in high school is cringe and immature, and I want nothing to do with that group"... said group was also using these new emojis as much as possible. So ended up making a mental hard lock that "anyone using emojis is an immature high schooler and so emojis are cringe". The good news is that this has softened over time... any while anyone using emojis these days just make me roll my eyes, I personally rarely every use them myself- I stick with your old acronyms (LOL, ROFL, XD, etc).

When it's so easy to read your own tone into text, emoticons and emojis help get the writer's intended tone across. As to why Reddit/some parts of the web had a frothing hate for emoticons? Because people also used them to be frivolous and silly when communicating, and we can only be serious on the Internet at all times. :eyeroll:

In short, I dig 'em for both reasons. You'll pry the "XD" emote out of my cold, dead hands.

EDIT to actually answer the question put forth:

Is Tildes anti-smileys / emotions?

I don't think so; we just use them sparingly, possibly due to leaning toward more serious tones.

Emoji, emoticons, and the like are textual replacements for the gestures and body language present in casual in-person conversations. For me, the emphasis there is on “casual”.

The less casual a conversation is, the less likely I am to use emoji. I routinely use them in text messages and chat environments (Matrix, Discord, Slack, etc.) The more formally I view an environment, the less likely I am to use them. On top of that, I have a slightly-more-formal-than-necessary persona in many online spaces. I'm not sure why, but it's been part of my communication practices since I first went online in the 1990s.

I view Tildes as a platform for semi-casual conversations, on par, perhaps, with Usenet or the listserves of a couple decades ago. The casual aspect means that emoji are acceptable as a means of conveying information. On the other hand, the non-immediate dialog brings a bit more formality into it. Since I have time to compose my responses, I'm more inclined to try to write in a way that expresses my emotions without emoji, drawing more on conventions and practices of more formal writing.

It's likely that many other people here are in a similar situation. The greater the degree to which Tildes is seen as a place for formal writing, the less of an inclination people will have to use markers of casual conversation like emoji.

(Side note: there's a fascinating book about online writing habits called Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. There's an entire chapter about emoji, which, among other things, links emoji to in-person gestures.)

I think the reddit issue with them is a holdover from when the Unicode/graphical emojis were new and not supported in all browsers or devices. Suddenly entire responses were either a string of unreadable characters or emojis, depending on your device.

Every time someone calls an emoticon "text emoji" I age ten years ;)

I have previously used them on tildes - I'm too set in my ways after having spent 20 years of my life as an IRC user - but I use them sparingly.

Emoji are (these days) unicode characters defined (I believe) by their semantic meaning or layout; they can look different from font to font. It's useful to have the ability to use such characters in text under certain circumstances. I remember, was it a South Park episode? in which people could be fingerprinted by their emoji use patterns, and I thought it was interesting at the time because that strikes me as extremely plausible. It's similar to how AI is increasingly capable of fingerprinting an individual by their prose; both are the same because both are carrying the contents of the message. In that way, emoji are a useful medium for communicating meaning.

As I'm not a visual person, to me at least it's much easier to parse a message written using actual words rather than an excessive amount of emoji, so I always hope people don't choose to overuse them.

I'm old (kinda), I come from times when SMS were paid for and not really cheap. Phones used character LCDs back then. If you wanted to show emotion, you had to use standard ASCII, that means emojis like this one :-)

When graphical emojis came to life, there were priblens with character sets, so sometime I saw blank rectangles instead of emojis. Or I didn't see anything at all and was cinfused what the sentence should mean.

Nowadays emojis are wildly spread and there are no problems with displaying them. Yet dues to historical reasons/problems, I don't use them that much. That said, I use them only when I'm intant messaging, I don't use them even in emails or in forums (I make rare exceptions).

So this is why you won't see me that much tossing emojis around. I'm not anti-emoji, I just don't use them much. I think that colon, dash and closing bracket can show the same :-)

Ascii art FTW!

Never understood why people are either anti emoji or do not use them. To me they help better express an emotion to what I am trying to say (I'm quite expressive).