this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
536 points (99.1% liked)
interestingasfuck
9145 readers
492 users here now
For exceptionally interesting content
Rules:
- Posts must be interesting
- Posts must be based in reality
- No hateful content
- No harmful content
- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I still don't understand this use of emoji.
It's not "I shoved a ๐ต up my ๐", I could get that, reject alphabet return to pictogram for the sake of compression if nothing else. But no, it's "I shoved a cactus ๐ต up my dick ๐" which is just...why are we doing this?
It's only compressing the message visually (it generally uses more data)
Also, at least for me, it takes more work to parse the images than words require. I have to like... shift out of reading mode, comprehend the image and then go back to reading.
How do emoji use more data? They're one, maybe two unicode characters?
And thus more data
Than an entire word?
Take "cactus" for example. Each letter in the word "cactus" is one unicode character, for a total of six. ๐ต is one unicode character, U+1F335.
Unicode characters are 4 bytes long, so "cactus" takes 24 bytes to transmit, where "๐ต" takes 4. Unless something something UTF_8?
You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.
So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5
Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.
So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ๐ตโ. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐ breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".
But that's not what people are doing
They always use a word and an emoji
Yes, to be clear I meant the example I gave where the word was replaced with the emoji was compression, not where they give the word and its emoji. That's as long-handed as possible.
Emojis are great when you want to convey tone or emotion that you normally can't do through text alone. I find them especially useful when a sentence as-is sounds a lot colder than you actually mean it to be
Obviously not the intention of OP and it's definitely excessive IMO but I do also find that they can be useful markers for longer texts. It gets a lot of hate but I find emojis really useful in codebase READMEs since you can quickly scan through and pick out the bits if information you're looking for
Having grown up chatting with friends and hitting on chicks via MSN messenger, I'm aware. "I'm gonna get you for that ๐ก " and "I'm gonna get you for that ๐ " are two different messages.
I will allege that emoji are badly suited to that task though. First, there are too many emoji. Even just the facial expressions, there are dozens of them. Second, they aren't designed to parse to emotions, they're designed to parse to facial expressions. Many of which are specific to Japanese culture. Third, they're rendered kinda tiny in a lot of fonts. With a font size and screen zoom level set where I can comfortably read text, many emoji are just...yellow circles. Or little blobs of color that I have to bring the screen much closer to my face to make out than the raw text.
Emoticons did the job better with less. But, entropy ruins all.