They do? 😶

I find usage in posted content to be generally very low, although I agree that if used in a supportive manner they help a lot to differentiate various ways a sentence can be interpreted.

On the contrary, I’ve hardly seen emojis on Reddit while here they appear a lot more frequently.

It might be an issue of the crowd you flock with? I haven’t seen emoji hatred on Lemmy, in fact I recall more support for it.

The only occasions where it’s frowned upon is when they are overused, it can be tiring to read a text littered with an emoji every four words.

For me mostly because I’m not a teenager.

Haven’t noticed much hate on lemmy though as it generally seems to have a younger user base.

Reddit had a whole thing about looking down on emojis for whatever reason. But during the influx over the summer there was a discussion here somewhere about whether we were going to keep that attitude going here, and the general consensus was no because it’s ridiculous.

We’ve been using emojis and their earlier equivalents to help clarify meaning and intent (as well as for humour, obviously) for as long as I’ve been on the internet, which means they’ve been in common use since at least the mid-to-late 90s. I use them all the time, all over Lemmy and Mastodon, and haven’t had anyone comment on it or call it out (except once but that was in a positive way).

It’s possible different communities have different attitudes, but unless you’re using them in an inappropriate way I expect the downvote thing is more of a coincidence (or possibly one person with a weird anti-emoji vendetta, we all know there are weird folks out there) rather than a site-wide culture thing.

p.s. just realised I got through a whole post without any of the things for once so here’s a few of my most often used just to brighten things up 😄 😅 😬 🤓 👍

Some of it may be an age thing, in my own case, i dislike emojis because i have no idea what most of them are supposed to mean., including the one at the end of your post. So for older folks like me, they make the post look weird, and can make it more difficult for me to understand what it is that you are trying to communicate.

But i wouldn't actually downvote you for it, im just more likely to ignore your post if it is overflowing with emojis.

I feel like most people (assuming you’re not on Reddit) don’t really care, so long as you’re not being spammy with them (or not just reply with only an emoji).

Every now and then I’ll tack one on at the end of a comment if I think that my tone might come of a bit more passive aggressive than I intended it to be, but most of the time I just see it as “I might need to rewrite this so that it doesn’t come off that way” instead.

I won’t dislike your post, but I generally don’t like it.

What does that emoji at the end of your post mean. Are you physically crying. Is it symbolic to mean you are unhappy or sad or disheartened or something else that I couldn’t think of.

Now imagine if you do a string of those and me trying to figure it out.

I mean with keyboards now, it is probably faster swiping out the phrase :”This saddens me” than that emoji.

Honestly, as long as you’re not going for a clickbait-like thing with lots of 😂, 😭, and 💀, when is not really justified, I don’t really see an issue.

Personally I’ll use ✨, ☺️, 🌸, and 🥺 regularly in my comments as I think they’re cute 🥺✨