Clever and fun read. Helps me think of emojis' literary affordances.

Here on a website that deprives us commenters of emoji, I feel expressively constrained.

Or maybe I'm too lazy to remember how to express myself with Japanese emoticons.

Will we get a trainman for the emoji era?

<3

This website is an anomaly. My style of communication is normally light hearted and rife with emojis setting the tone of my messages. Here I always need to adapt if I want to say something. "how can I choose my words to minimize risk of misunderstanding". This often means that I express myself like some sort humourless robot (imo). And that's also how I think about other commenters. Dry, academic/humourless, men (yes) obsessing over technical details in news in order to make money. But I get that this is intentional and on topic so as long as I'm not reading comments on some topic that naturally includes feelings (controversial/political figures/companies) it's fine and actually a breath of fresh air compared to other more expressive discussion forums.