It's been rough. No good job prospects, no money.

But!

Some things ✨shine✨ and do hold value even in these troubled times.


I tried posting a poll about the use of emoji in Everything2. Granted, it was a bit inflammatory, but I'm fine with provoking heated debates as long as we all agree beforehand that it's a trivial matter, all things considered.

But is it really trivial?

Sure, the noders of ages past had no such tools and had to craft their nodes out of readily available materials, such as stone and clay. Some of those remains exist today at the Everything2 Museum and remind us of the tortuous path we—as a species—have come since those ancient times.

All jokes aside, writing is a form of communication, and as such it evolves over time. E2 is a platform where we share writings over the internet, and it too has changed in form, content, expectations and culture. According to the current user poll, we no longer use the same criteria as before when it comes to voting:

Andycyca asks: Is it ethically acceptable to vote on "old" writeups based on present-day criteria?
Answer Absolute Percentage
Always (100% of the time) 16 45.71%
Almost always (75-100% of the time) 5 14.29%
Most of the time (50--75% of the time) 4 11.43%
On occasion (25--50% of the time) 3 8.57%
Almost never (0--25% of the time) 0 0.00%
Never, under any circumstances (0% of the time) 0 0.00%
My voting patterns and criteria are nuanced beyond this tool and I will msg andycyca with an essay about them 6 17.14%
None of the above 1 2.86%
Total 35 100.00%

Then, what about writing? It's a fact that we—that is, the whole internet—uses English differently online than offline (see Gretchen McCulloch's «Because Internet»). But how about specific places on the internet? How important is a single site's own «style» to that site's identity and preservation of the same?

It's no secret that emoji are widely used in many places and—in my opinion—sometimes for the better (see: good GitHub documentation). It's also true and evident that an overuse of emoji can obscure the text, both in form and in content (it's difficult and slightly annoying to read 👏THREE 👏 WORD 👏 TWEETS 👏 in abundance)

But what about E2? It's true that it's a place focused almost exclusively on text (hell, even mathematical notation is second class content), but as the poll above shows, at least the community standards towards voting has changed. What's more, the definition of «Text» in the Internet at large has changed, and the use of emoji is so entrenched that I can use these small images because they are part of the Unicode standard, and most modern browsers accept them without a hitch. Removing its support would be more difficult at this point. I can insert the emoji without any kind of consensus from E2's community, or even the Gods.

So, what gives? One could argue that «Emoji can lead to an emphasis on the visual component rather than the purely text-driven content», but that stinks of appeal to tradition and I'm not too keen on it. After all, there's already lots of AI-based text generators and I don't see them flooding new writeups.

Maybe the fact that E2 is not as popular also helps alleviate this effect. The fact that E2's members are mostly self-selected towards people who prefer text, the danger of emoji overrunning text content doesn't seem realistic. If we were the size of, say, Reddit, it would be different.

For now I wish only to leave this question open. How do you feel about emoji in E2? Would you prefer a completely emoji-free E2? Do you think they can enhance the text component? Something else? Please, please share your thoughts.

The daylog was cut short due to inserting emoji. It will be restored soon--Andy

I stand by tradition. No emojis. No pictures. No gifs.

I do not think emojis add anything to communication.

Will this be nuked?

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