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Why do Lemmy users rarely use emoticons?
(lemmy.today)
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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For me emoticons were something that started when all of the boomers came to Facebook. Floods and floods of useless emojis left and right. So now I feel weird using them, like I'm cheapening the platform while also acting like the people that ruined Facebook for me
Emoticons are old internet. Emojis are boomer, normie, and corpo friendly translations.
Wait, who was using "old Internet" if not boomers?
Most boomers I know still can't use a mouse. Millennials and gen X fill most of the old Internet in my mind, but the original '91 Internet was a lot of tech focused boomers, but also was significantly Gen X. '95-'99 seemed to pick up more traction with my generation.
I think it's sample bias. I graduated with a CS degree in 85 and started working as a software engineer in aerospace. It was pretty much all boomers when I started.
There might be more people from later generations who grew up doing their homework on computers, so the disparity between tech folks and non-tech folks in those later generations seems less, but the Internet was mostly created by boomer tech people.
I'm the senior manager of the organization I started in in 85, and I still have boomers working for me.