I hate emojis. They can all fuck off.
They are one of the (many) things I hate about the modern Internet modern life.
For one thing, I hate their ubiquity.
There's a goddamn movie about the things for fuck's sake.
It sounds shit (obviously I'm basing my assessment on that xkcd comic, but I think that's probably fair).
But the thing I hate the most about them is the prevalent and lazy assumption that everyone wants to use them. An obvious manifestation of this is applications which assume that a) I want to see them (I don't) and b) I want to type them (ditto).
I don't like to see them because, to me, they are a reminder of how far we have fallen as a species and they don't belong in intelligent discourse. Obviously that's just, like, my opinion, but it's a valid one. Unfortunately, I still have to deal with the sodding things.
Slack at least has the decency to let me disable the display of emojis, for which I am profoundly thankful.
When someone responds to something of mine on Slack with an emoji, I see text like :+1 or :laughing: or, my favourite, :slightly_smiling_face:.
When using Firefox, I use an extension Emoji to English which I think was intended as a translation tool to make sense of vague emojis, but allows you to replace them completely with the text representation.
I like the fact that this is breaking people's expectations of what I should be seeing.
I particularly like it when I come across a site that's actively broken when you mess around with the emoji display.
I also do not want to type emojis, but some applications like to translate what I type into babyspeak emojis and I have to Ctrl-Z in the hope of undoing the damage.
Microsoft Teams, for one, does this.
I remember the time I fired up the web version of Teams (everything's a damn webapp these days, they're shit as well) and it popped up one of those intensely smug and irritating announcements of a Great New Feature that somebody obviously though needed to be announced to the masses - automatic translation of what you typed into emojis.
My requirements here are very simple.
If I type a : (ASCII 58) followed by - (ASCII 45) and then ) (ASCII 41), I expect my document to show me :-) and the byte sequence underlying this to be 58, 45, 41 i.e. what I typed.
I do not expect it to turn into a :slightly_smiling_face: emoji.
I typed what I typed for a reason - because I wanted those characters in whatever I was writing - and I do not expect software to fuck with what I type without my permission.
You may think I am over-reacting. I will entertain that as a possibility. In the great pantheon of "things which can fuck off" (sample members: blockchain, Donald Trump, AI, drivers who don't give cyclists enough room when overtaking, Donald Trump again, climate change deniers, holocaust deniers, vaccine deniers, flat earthers, Donald Trump for a third time, all Windows versions after 7, unclear recycling instructions on soft plastics, influencers, fucking Donald Trump yet again, childrens' books that are supposed to rhyme but don't scan properly) I will concede that emojis are probably not the highest priority things that should fuck off. But they totally can nevertheless.
:-)