[TeMPOraL]

There's one very popular emoji I particularly hate: https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/.

Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - and with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.

[jobigoud]

It has a big smile. How would you interpret this as despair?

[topmonk]

I know this is anecdotal but there are several examples of this on the web: https://imgur.com/gallery/2VRFr

[huffmsa]

Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling.

But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.

[TeMPOraL]

In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.

[huffmsa]

I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair.

It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.

[ahoka]

"The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate ambiguity and nuance (shades of meaning) from the language, and so reduce the language to simple concepts—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness ..."

[icebraining]

What a weird response to a post describing how ambiguous emojies can be.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Oh dear. I've seen this website before, but hadn't thought of it for too long.

My favourite emoji is Apple's rendering of Zany Face: https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-one-large-and-one-...

I find some of those ... disturbing.

[swebs]

It's weird how the meaning of an emoji can change so dramatically depending on which font you're using. The biggest example is the moon face emoji. On Twitter or Android, it's just a cute little moon. On Apple, it suddenly becomes molester moon.

https://emojipedia.org/new-moon-with-face/