Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It can be a way of adding intonation and other affective, out-of-band communication back into text. I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one. But interspersed throughout a message, emojis can, as you say, add irony, but also communicate that a message that could be taken as ironic isn't, or communicate some other subtext.

Text is a flattening of speech, and emojis can add some of those missing dimensions back -- and, like our IRL verbal cues, tics, and gestures, they can be hard to decode if you're not "in" on the game.



> I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one.

This article does that. Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically.

> To stay relevant in the age of social media you had to support emoji or you were in the .

EDIT: HN stripped the emoji. The end of that sentence was "or you were :skull: in the :droplet:", read as "or you were dead in the water".


> Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically.

Maybe not ironically, but doing that definitely adds informality - exactly the kind of out-of-band context that GP is talking about.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: