#please don't ever think i use emoji to clarify the tone of my statement. those are for Flavour

[lindwurmkai]

every time i see the suggestion that people should "simply" use emoji instead of tone tags, i just kinda recoil in horror because:

we all know that emoji are displayed differently depending on your device's OS, right? and that sometimes the different versions give off completely different vibes??

many emoji are ambiguous to begin with, not to mention some people are just bad at interpreting them. my brother once used 😬 to indicate happiness and i still haven't recovered

there is a whole tradition of using particular emoji sarcastically at all times and never using them seriously. which emoji that applies to, however, depends on how old you are and/or what habits evolved in your particular subculture(s)

emoji represent facial expressions, not tone. that's where the sarcastic usage of 🙂 came from - it looks more like a pained smile than a genuine smile to many people. the pained smile is a real expression that people make irl when they're frustrated or on the verge of despair, so using an emoji that way is not deceptive. but it does cause confusion!!

i don't even like tone tags. i'm just saying this is literally worse 😭