#how our discord emoji options affect our typing and communication

[strixton]

idk how to explain this but emojis have formed their own ever morphing language and its fascinating to me

how the shift from what color heart you use for someone can differentiate between friend, crush, and lover. and how it's unique for each person.

watching how some peoples emoji language changes from group chat to group chat.

how generations use emojis differently.

I know the emoji analysis thing in Southpark was a joke, but honestly, if I had more of a brain for it, I'd study emoji usage for fun, and see how it works

[lolly-dolli]

My Melodramatic Skype "Update" Review--An Amalgamation of First-World Problems

Where do I start with this–stop trying to be hip. That’s not what people use Skype for. They use it to communicate-to make video calls and send messages and files, and that’s it.

Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted a barely-functional, mangled mishmash of all the worst features of Snapchat, Discord and Messenger.

Nobody came here for a social media site–they came here for a video chatting and messaging app that allows for file sharing.

The enter button no longer works.

Or, it does, but all it will do is close your keyboard. This is incredibly problematic for people sending long messages, not to mention basic functionality.

Another outdated function Skype thought would be a wonderful idea to rip from Discord is the inability to change back autocorrected words. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but when your autocorrect is buggy and you use a lot of non-recognized and made-up words like I do, it’s very frustrating to endlessly have to go back and retype the same word over and over and over again until your autocorrect finally recognizes it.

Basic Skype functionality has been thrown out the window–this is their way of telling you “go fuck yourself, we’re HIP now. Forget being able to share things you made with your family, check out this Snapchat clone!”

There is no contacts option–not that I could find, anyway. Only recent chats. Skype is very determined in trying to focus on the “new.”

The same can be said for any sort of settings menu, so you don’t even have any option of turning some of these functions off.

The voice messages would be a great idea…if they weren’t right where the “send” button goes.

Why not just put them in the menu below the chatbox?

Speaking of the menu–it’s been mangled to all hell.

Remember file sharing and contact sharing? The two functions of Skype that are one of the biggest reasons I haven’t completely switched over to Discord? Well, you may as well forget them–all you can send are pictures and videos now–and Skype is so dedicated to destroying their user base that they manage to make even something as simple as sending an image painful that you almost have to commend them.

Not only do you no longer have the typical choice of recent files, downloads, etc–this is replaced by a shoddy clone of Discord’s (much more effective) popup menu, but you can only view one album at a time, and the default is your camera roll. And I remind you–you cannot switch between album view and gallery view. This is fine for those of us who take a lot of photos, but for those of us who mainly share art and work from multiple folders at the same time, it’s a huge problem.

Say I have two recently-created images in different folders, and want to share both with my friends.

Instead of taking five seconds, this takes five minutes, because this new “feature” is never explained in the, erm…tutorial.

Do not get me started on the tutorial. I went to it expecting some sort of explanation as to how to use this lumbering, Frankenstein’s Monster of a “program”, and was given no such respite.

First, you’re told to swipe something up from the bottom of the screen. Alright, fair enough.

Then, the cards make their first appearance.

I think this is one of the most insulting features of the program.

These…things, meant to show you how to use the program, spend the entirety of the “tutorial” forcing you to “update” your profile and create useless new groups that you didn’t even want to make. Choose a theme. Did you like the theme you chose? Good, now negate that choice by choosing another. Now change your profile picture. Yes, you do have to use the same terrible menu as before. Want to skip this tutorial? Too bad, these cards don’t go away until you finish! Scratch that, they won’t go away even after! Trying to escape by dismissing all these cards at once, I see! Too bad, they’ll come right back once you tap that “1” at the top of the screen! This is the future! Fuck what our customers think they want! They’re a bunch of brainless millennials! The chart knows better!

I’m half-convinced that this is Skype’s way of forcing you to throw away the old and begrudgingly accept the new.

It wasn’t until my second go at giving this…”program” a chance for review purposes that I finally discovered that the “tutorials” go away…once you complete all of them.

And yes–I installed this thing twice. I uninstalled Skype and reinstalled it through Galaxy Apps just so I could have the old, functional Skype.

I was actually convinced that the app being forcibly replaced was a strange fever dream until I saw that the beta–yes, the changeling imposter they randomly decided to give me was a beta, as in an app that is still in development.

But, getting back on topic, only once you play along and “give them a chance” are you granted the option to open the settings menu…which has no options to fix any of this mess. No autocorrect options, no enter key functions, nothing.

The only one I found even remotely useful was to change that godawful rainbow theme.

I’m gay. I love tits (in unlimited quantity), and I love rainbows…in moderation. I despise the default look of this thing. It literally hurts to look at because the colors are so painfully bright.

Thankfully, the app allows the small respite of a black and white theme, which actually looks quite nice with the format they’ve chosen for the new menu.

Although it does leave me asking why they ask you to choose a color scheme if it doesn’t affect the theme. I assume it changes how your messages or profile look to others, but I can’t really tell, as this update was thankfully not forced on any of my friends.

I actually spent ten minutes capslocking about it in a group chat, which I feel bad about in hindsight since none of them knew what the bloody hell I was talking about.

Now, as for things I do like–the idea of combining video messages and pictures into one section in the chatbox menu and adding in the option to draw and add stickers to both is fun and makes the chatbox menu a bit easier to navigate.

The option to send .gifs is also great, and you can also draw on the image and video files you send! That’s a really cool, really fun feature! If you added in the option to view pictures in gallery mode, this would be an extremely welcome addition!

The option to react to messages is…okay? I never really use that in Discord but I guess some people might enjoy it.

You can only really use six of Skype’s default emojis though, which is a lot more limited and really ruins the idea of it when you can just reply to the message with your own emoji or image, and the option to send .gifs also negates this effect since one of the things people use .gifs for is reaction images.

I really am not at all interested in the new Snapchat thing they have though, and taking up a whole third of the menu rather than just having a contacts thing is just silly to me. I’ve never used Snapchat in the first place, but if I wanted to, I’d just download Snapchat. This is really only furthered by the fact that there’s also the “Highlights” section–the thing that lets you view other peoples’ Snapchat things.

I really think that this would be a lot less annoying a feature if the option to create a Snapchat-type-thingy were inside the Highlights menu as a little bubble, sort of like the “plus” for adding contacts and starting calls in the bottom corner of the old app, except restricted to the Highlights section.

A also really don’t recommend forcing this as an update–or at least leaving it as the only option.

Just like how Windows 7 is still around for those who don���t like Windows 8 or 10, I’d recommend having it as a separate app–a more social-media-focused one–while leaving the option of still being able to download the old, communication-focused version.

But then, I also don’t know if putting an app up on the app store costs, and I doubt they’ll continue to support and patch an old UI so I can’t say how likely that is to happen.

Anyway, there’s my two cents on this random app.