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by pfp 1218 days ago
I guess I should feel relieved that I don't at least have my work discussions littered with these ones.

But they're not too different from the set of infantilizing pictograms that did make their way into the standard & that grown-ups are now expected to deal with.

4 comments

Wouldn’t it have been interesting to be a fly on the wall during the annual convening of the ancient Egyptian’s hieroglyphics committee?

“This year’s proposals for new entries into the standard hieroglyphic dictionary include: slave being whipped, bearded slave being whipped, woman being humped by a donkey, and bearded donkey being ridden by a pregnant cat.”

I think they're nice and help to add tone and context in an increasingly online workplace.

The world is better because the director of my billion dollar project is able to heart react in the chat, not worse.

They were able to heart react before emojis were added to Unicode too. Custom emoticons were a thing a long time ago.
Really? We use slack and all staff has access to add new emojis. You can just imagine how that would turn out...
Well, at least then you could think of the addons as local slang. It's still unnecessary, but limited to the social circle at your workplace.

I didn't have a huge beef with the proprietary emojis on old skool Skype and MSN, TBH - they were technically bound to those platforms, and the platforms mostly to private social spheres where they'd form part of the local slang. (And where Skype was used at work in the 00's, people actually refrained from them and acted in a businesslike manner).

Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.

> Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.

This just reads a bit like someone older ranting at the younger generation being glued to their smartphone all the time. Modern day emojis are part of our writing system. I use them all the time, from Slack to WhatsApp. They are universally understood, to a limit of course, but I see everybody else using them too and no "office drama" because Alice misunderstood the emoji Bob was using. They make it easier for me to express my emotions and they are as naturally as speaking. There's nothing extraordinarily horrifying really.

Fun fact: The Adobe enterprise slack workspace is not only open to everyone to add emojis, but (AFAIK) every slack-using company that Adobe has ever acquired has had their slack workspace subsumed into the Adobe one, which includes bringing in all of the acquiree's emojis. :-)
The future is now old man UwU