How much of the current lemmy base are ex-reddit? I remember emoticons being heavily frowned upon there. It may be a cultural hangover from the rexodus peeps.

Because lemmy users tend to be tech literate millennials or older, who were using the internet before it became a widely popular and used thing.

We remember a time before emojis. And to us, there is art, and more meaning in continuing the old ways of using textual symbols in clever ways to convey an emotion.

Emojis are a cop out, a cheap and easy way to do the same, invented for a mass audience that didnt want to do any thinking or be clever in any kind of way and wanted it all handed to them.

I realize this may sound silly but I will die on this hill: emojis are for children and the technically illiterate, they are an appropriation of a culture spawned by some gen x and mostly millennials when the curious of us forged our own way onto what was at one point in time a frontier of seemingly infinite possibility.

E(o)3

E(@)3 bonus prolapse edition

I think one of the biggest reasons for the switch from emoticons to emoji can be seen in this thread, emojis are pretty much universally supported whereas a lot of emoticons break Markdown (specifically anything with a backslash or a less-than sign)

In chats I use emojis very often, but I here I feel like some emojis may not show properly, so I avoid them. Though here I tend to use smiles and such :)