Comment by brookst
5 months ago
I think this is more about age cohorts than anything intrinsic to emojis.
I’m also of an age where emojis are more distracting than informative, but I notice younger colleagues use them liberally and with significant information value.
Like if I were to write three bullets about the results of an experiment, I would use three actual bullet points for maybe describing the hypothesis, the test methodology, and the result.
Plenty of people I work with would use a light bulb bullet for the hypothesis, a clipboard for the methodology, and a chart up or down for results.
It’s overly cute to me, but it works for them, and it does kind of provide a visual index.
I specifically referenced LLM use because it seems to rather pointlessly just spray them everywhere. I didn't complain about them existing in general. I can old-fogey quibble with specific uses when humans add them with purpose but can also easily acknowledge it's just a taste matter. But LLMs seem to love that rocket ship, the green checkmark, that celebration emoji with the confetti coming out of the cardboard tube, and a few other ones that are only loosely related to the content. Also loves to point fingers at links, which are often already distinguished in the text. And seeing through all that is a real pain.
That your eyes are drawn more to color and shape than monochrome text is not an old person thing. That's a human thing.
In many cases this becomes an arms race too, where people start competing to make their content more colorful than the last, and that arms race has only one end, where the "engagement hooks" completely overwhelm the content. We've seen that one play out in a number of places already.
I think age plays a role, but so does being neuroatypical (attention, dyslexia, etc.); some people are more easily distracted at any age.