I think I once saw a comment by someone stating that they had a policy of systematically downvoting all comments containing an emoticon, except exceptionally good ones.
Hope that wasn’t me. My dislike for emoticons has somehow waned during recent years and sometimes I even use them myself when I want to be really sure that my interlocutor doesn’t misinterpret me as being serious when I am not, but I am the sort of person that has commenting policies and it’s not that improbable that this was one of them.
I don’t like lol, but I don’t mind it too badly when it’s being used where the person would genuinely be laughing out loud. When people use it as a placeholder or punctuation, which is often the case, I regard it as I would someone who actually laughs at inappropriate points in a conversation. Not positively to say the least.
I’m noticing that I like capital LOL more than lowercase lol: this is either because LOL is an acronym, or because I’ve just been primed by the two of you.
In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “HTML” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame. Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.
Yeah, I noticed that smileys are apparently pretty controversial. Is there anything specific you dislike about smileys? Are there things that make you tolerate some smileys more than others?
I generally don’t like smileys that are too yellow and too big so they stretch out lines of text and don’t match the color scheme and sometimes are animated and boingy, which is why I specified tastefulness and greenishness. We could also have some sort of policy where you can only use one in a row so people don’t just spam smileys. But that’s just my preference!
It’s hard for me to say exactly what I dislike about smilies. My best approximation is that I try to parse text as if it were speech, mentally inserting things like tone and facial expression where appropriate. Smilies don’t parse as speech, and I’m already mentally inserting the elements of tone that they’re supposed to stand in for.
The way it affects me is rather like a person ending a sentence with
“Fweeeee!”
And when I ask “Why did you make that sound?” they say
“So you can tell I’m enthusiastic!”
If I had been taught to read in a context where smilies were effectively punctuation marks used to denote tone, I might not feel any differently about them than, say, exclamation marks. But I wasn’t, and as is I can’t help thinking of them as unnecessary and annoying additions to a text that should be expressive enough on its own, the way I can’t help thinking of wordless emotive noises tacked on the ends of sentences as extraneous and annoying.
That makes a lot of sense. Smileys aren’t very natural for text within paragraphs because paragraphs can convey tone as a whole entity. But for those of us who learned to type in chat/IM environments, smileys make a huge difference because you don’t have a whole entity to reference in that situation. A conversation is a stream of statements, so if someone says “you stupid jerk!” in IM, you’re expected to reply—but in a conversation it would be clear that they really mean “you stupid jerk! =P” through tone and facial expression. So that’s how people naturally become smiley-dependent.
Perhaps we should invest in a tasteful set of greenish smileys.
I was once told that someone would upvote me iff I got rid of the smiley in my comment. (or perhaps it was an “lol”)
I think I once saw a comment by someone stating that they had a policy of systematically downvoting all comments containing an emoticon, except exceptionally good ones.
I heard that there’s a user who downvotes all comments that don’t have emoticons.
o.O
(No, the point of this comment is not to test hypotheses about karma.)
Hope that wasn’t me. My dislike for emoticons has somehow waned during recent years and sometimes I even use them myself when I want to be really sure that my interlocutor doesn’t misinterpret me as being serious when I am not, but I am the sort of person that has commenting policies and it’s not that improbable that this was one of them.
I still hate “lol” pretty passionately, however.
I’m ok with LOL, unless it’s someone LOLing at their own jokes.
I don’t like lol, but I don’t mind it too badly when it’s being used where the person would genuinely be laughing out loud. When people use it as a placeholder or punctuation, which is often the case, I regard it as I would someone who actually laughs at inappropriate points in a conversation. Not positively to say the least.
I’m noticing that I like capital LOL more than lowercase lol: this is either because LOL is an acronym, or because I’ve just been primed by the two of you.
That … confuses me so much. Did you do it?
Yes.
I will openly second that the LW style feels rude to me, and the style that I’ve learned to write in while posting on here also feels rude.
For the person who asked for an example of a “nice” forum: The comments on TED talks always struck me as nice but instructive.
Oh, and I’ve just remembered this:
-- Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen
(I won’t comment about that.)
So, how do people feel about animated emoticons?
They have their place in certain forums, LW isn’t one of those forums.
While I favor more mindfulness of being welcoming and considerate here, I am heavily opposed to the use of smilies.
The person daenerys is referring to in her comment is not me, but I just don’t like them.
Yeah, I noticed that smileys are apparently pretty controversial. Is there anything specific you dislike about smileys? Are there things that make you tolerate some smileys more than others?
I generally don’t like smileys that are too yellow and too big so they stretch out lines of text and don’t match the color scheme and sometimes are animated and boingy, which is why I specified tastefulness and greenishness. We could also have some sort of policy where you can only use one in a row so people don’t just spam smileys. But that’s just my preference!
It’s hard for me to say exactly what I dislike about smilies. My best approximation is that I try to parse text as if it were speech, mentally inserting things like tone and facial expression where appropriate. Smilies don’t parse as speech, and I’m already mentally inserting the elements of tone that they’re supposed to stand in for.
The way it affects me is rather like a person ending a sentence with
“Fweeeee!”
And when I ask “Why did you make that sound?” they say
“So you can tell I’m enthusiastic!”
If I had been taught to read in a context where smilies were effectively punctuation marks used to denote tone, I might not feel any differently about them than, say, exclamation marks. But I wasn’t, and as is I can’t help thinking of them as unnecessary and annoying additions to a text that should be expressive enough on its own, the way I can’t help thinking of wordless emotive noises tacked on the ends of sentences as extraneous and annoying.
That makes a lot of sense. Smileys aren’t very natural for text within paragraphs because paragraphs can convey tone as a whole entity. But for those of us who learned to type in chat/IM environments, smileys make a huge difference because you don’t have a whole entity to reference in that situation. A conversation is a stream of statements, so if someone says “you stupid jerk!” in IM, you’re expected to reply—but in a conversation it would be clear that they really mean “you stupid jerk! =P” through tone and facial expression. So that’s how people naturally become smiley-dependent.