Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The difference is that with emoticons you could invent your own combinations and variations. Different people would use different variations of basically the same emoticon. You could come up with new ones hat hadn’t been used before. With emojis, you have a fixed set, and it is what it is.

Another difference is that emoticons blend in to the text visually. Your eyes aren’t draw to them like they are when you have a paragraph of text with colorful emoji sprinkled in-between, which can be much more jarring.



I know what you mean, but Emoji isn't a fixed set. Unicode is regularly revised and more characters and emoji are added, based on decisions made by the Unicode Consortium: https://blog.emojipedia.org/whats-new-in-unicode-15-1-and-em...


Depending on forum software and type of instant messenger, end users couldn't include their own emoticons.


We are talking about emoticons composed of and displayed as text characters, like :-) or =D or ^_^.


Are we?

The thread started out with:

> This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images.

Which I claimed were not termed emoji at the time. Those were all called emoticons or smileys in that time frame. At least in my neck of the woods.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: