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If you have spent a significant amount of time on Reddit (it’s easy to fall down that rabbit hole at 2 am!) you may have noticed that the attitude towards emojis on this forum is less than positive.
For many people, emojis are a fun and easy way to express feelings. While it might be hard to see how anything could be wrong with that, many Reddit users feel quite strongly against the use of emojis on the platform.
In this article, we’ll be exploring several reasons (4, to be exact) why some Redditors absolutely hate emojis.
Do Redditors Really Hate Emojis?
It’s important to note that many people who use Reddit don’t actually hate emojis. About 48 million people use Reddit on a regular basis, so there’s just no way everyone on the platform feels the same about any one issue, emojis included.
As with any online platform, people will have different opinions, and some people feel far more strongly than others about certain topics.
The average Reddit user probably wouldn’t say that they hate emojis – although they might admit that they don’t personally like to use them or find them mildly annoying.
With that being said, there is definitely a community of Redditors that are outspoken about their strong dislike for emojis, and we’re about to find out why.
Reasons Why Redditors Hate Emojis
They Are Fairly New
The first emoji was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita. However, emojis didn’t start to become a popular method of online communication until the 2010s, when they started to be adopted by many mobile operators.
Reddit was founded in 2005, and many people who use the platform today have been around since the very beginning.
Because emojis didn’t start to become commonplace in the online sphere until roughly a decade later, the sudden emergence of emojis as a way to communicate definitely rubbed some Redditors the wrong way.
To this day, some Redditors haven’t become accustomed to the prominence of emojis in online communication and find them to be both confusing and annoying.
Some may describe this attitude as being ‘stuck in the past’, but ultimately, a lot of us can probably relate to the feeling of longing for simpler times gone by.
Anyway, the bottom line is that a lot of Redditors who either openly or silently hate emojis do so because they see them as new-fangled and unnecessary.
They Are Seen As Low-Effort
Many Redditors express a dislike of emojis (or at least, excessive use of emojis) because they may be used as a way to avoid finding the correct words to express an emotion.
‘But why does that matter?’ we hear you ask. Again, to a lot of people, it really doesn’t.
We can’t stress enough that the majority of Reddit users aren’t pulling their hair out over a few emojis being used here and there.
However, the thing to remember when it comes to Reddit is that it uses a ‘coin’ and award-based system to reward interesting posts.
If you win an award (ironically, the symbols for Reddit awards are technically emojis), you can get premium access to Reddit, so many users care a lot about the quality of their posts as well as others’.
A common refrain from Reddit users who don’t like emojis is ‘use your words’. When you think about it, if someone has spent a long time formulating a written post that perfectly expresses their feelings on a subject in order to win some Reddit gold, only to see that same gold awarded to a post made up of 50% monkey face emojis, a little irritation is somewhat understandable. Hatred is probably a bit strong, though.
They Can Be Distracting
Some people find that emojis distract them while they’re trying to read and understand a post. More emojis are being created all the time, which means that it’s hard to keep track of what they all mean.
Because of this, Redditors may get annoyed at having to stop and pause to figure out what an emoji means and why it has been used. Therefore, certain users of Reddit would prefer for emojis not to be used at all.
Admittedly, some people do have a tendency to overuse emojis. Most Redditors won’t have a problem with a single emoji at the end of a paragraph or at an appropriate point within a sentence, but can we all admit that two entire rows of laughing emojis after a three-word sentence is a bit much?
Another reason why emojis can be especially distracting and puzzling for some Redditors has to do with device incompatibility, which we’re going to explain in our next point.
They May Be Incompatible With Some Devices
If you’ve ever been communicating with somebody online only to see some random boxes or squares dotted throughout their messages, you have experienced the emoji incompatibility issue first-hand.
Newer mobile devices such as more recent models of the iPhone, for example, have an updated library of emojis complete with all the most recently added ones.
However, these emojis are not available for use on older mobile devices and sometimes may not even show up on the screen, either in messages or on web pages.
This can be a problem for some Redditors who may be using older mobile devices because posts made by people with more recent devices appear to be filled with blank squares.
Again, for a lot of people, this might not seem like a big issue, but if the majority of someone’s post is emojis and you can’t even see what the emojis are, it’s understandable that it might be a little irritating.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, the average Redditor isn’t too bothered about emojis one way or another.
However, some people on Reddit do find emojis annoying, and this is usually for a few reasons.
Ultimately, hatred of emojis on Reddit (as on any online platform) comes down to the fact that people consider using emojis to be unnecessary, a form of communicational laziness, or a distraction when reading posts.
Additionally, not everyone can view every emoji on their device, which can be frustrating.
