
South Koreans use emoji to express playful sentiments they wouldn’t utter aloud - r0n0j0y
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/the-curious-adventures-of-con-and-frodo
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avindroth
For a while, I thought it was strange how native Koreans would use extraneous
~,^^, ㅋ, and emojis in messengers.

Having lived here for over a year now, I see myself using those once-foreign
symbols as part of my messaging jargon.

I feel it softens communication with the other person. The effect is similar
to that of a smile; you can say anything while smiling and it won't look so
aggressive.

If you message without healthy utilization of these symbols, the negative
effect is similar to that of ending texts with period marks. No matter the
content, the tone will seem aggressive.

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silencio
Aw, come on, mentioning Kakao Friends without Apeach? :)
[https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-
xaf1/t51.2885-15/e...](https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-
xaf1/t51.2885-15/e15/11287911_1397529980574256_1009294730_n.jpg)

My last trip to Seoul I even picked up an Apeach pillow and set of peach-butt
coasters from the Kakao store. Love that dude.

These are stickers for sure. My Asian friends and family use them all the
time, including as replies on their own. Even my parents and 70-80+ year old
relatives do this with regularity. The extra context that these stickers add
are very useful and I wish they were more popular among my non-Asian friends.
Somehow little rows of emoji and Slack reactions are just not quite the same.

~~~
rpgmaker
> _Aw, come on, mentioning Kakao Friends without Apeach?_

What about MSN Messenger Winks? They seem like a clear precursor to these
Stickers and probably predate them by 5 years at least.

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amagumori
i hope stickers catch on here in america and dont just stay an east asian
thing. i think they're a better form of expressing emotion than emoji. the
"nice" thing about emojis is that they're standardized, but i don't think
anyone realized how hackneyed and played out emojis would get. when i see
tears-laughing-emoji these days, i roll my eyes, because i think of dumb
instagram memes. in general, they're tiny icons that are kind of lacking in
expressiveness to begin with. i've gotten really tired of them, and so have a
lot of other people. you start to think they're dumb. stickers don't do that
because they convey more complex emotional information.

i find with emojis that i always want new and more specific ones, and stickers
cater to that perfectly. emojis are this wan, broad "happy" or "sad" emotional
marker, which doesn't really convey all that much, while, as discussed in the
article, stickers can convey really complex and pithy feelings related to the
cultural environment people are living in. this makes them feel like a more
honest and human method of communication through emotional pictograph, or
whatever.

~~~
white-flame
The one "standardized" one that always messes up my communication is ":-P". To
me, in ASCII, that's not a playful, smiling, stick out your tongue at your
friend sort of thing, but rather an exasperated "Just found out I had to
refile all my TPS reports. :-P".

While the only places I tend to have ascii->emoticon functionality is Skype
and Slack, the auto-replacement for that usage never fits the mood, and I
never seem to find a good representation of how I interpret ":-P".

But more to the point, I think that these stickers have already caught on as
what we would call meme images, especially on image boards. They're just not
well integrated elsewhere.

~~~
s_kilk
> To me, in ASCII, that's not a playful, smiling, stick out your tongue at
> your friend sort of thing, but rather an exasperated "Just found out I had
> to refile all my TPS reports. :-P".

I'd wager you're in a pretty small minority there. In fact, I'm struggling to
think of a way in which :-P would not be seen as playful.

Do you have an example of the kind of facial expression you see in that
particular sequence of characters?

~~~
unimpressive
I have the exact same problem as the grandparent. :P

For me it's something like a more muted version of this expression:
[http://www.nontoxicpestcontrol.com/uploads/2012/06/Poison-
He...](http://www.nontoxicpestcontrol.com/uploads/2012/06/Poison-Help-
Hotline.png)

Which is a caricature, because this is more of a platonic-ideal expression
than one humans actually do.

It generally replaces an expression like "Heh." or "Ew." or "Bleh." or general
irony. It's rarely _playful_ in the 'child sticking their tongue out' sense.

Corpus taken from IRC of me using it:

13:58 <REDACTED> Bringing me up half a standard deviation would take me into
loony land. :P

16:03 <REDACTED> What? :P

00:58 <REDACTED> You always cave at the last moment. :P

23:05 <REDACTED> Sometimes I lose faith in my potential. :P

05:55 <REDACTED> You know, normally telling somebody "Oh hey I just had a
nightmare about you." would deeply offend them, but I get the impression that
is totally within-aesthetic for you. :P

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personjerry
Re: stickers

In Europe WhatsApp is a lot more popular than Messenger, and so people use
emojis a lot, instead of stickers. Anecdotally I believe the amount of emojis
in a conversation in Europe is many times the amount of sticker use in a
conversation in North America.

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wodenokoto
Don't everybody do that with stickers?

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pcurve
Kakao has some of the best stickers.

The best part is, most are animated. And really well.

You can see some of them here.. about a minute into the video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpM8lUlMH4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpM8lUlMH4)

There are constantly new sets coming out, and they are very cheap too. Most of
them $2.

~~~
Razengan
Line has cool stickers too, though I'm not sure if it has animated ones.

~~~
level3
Yes, it has animated stickers, as well as ones with sound.

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bitwize
It reminds me of Facebook stickers. I get those a lot from Asian friends.

~~~
jwagenet
Perhaps because Line stickers are the archetype for Facebook stickers, which
Facebook introduced to attract Asian users already used to sharing them on
Line and Kakao.

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corv
Yeah, I must be getting old...

~~~
protomyth
The funny part is all the near future SciFi with kanji characters needs to
have them replaced in a special edition with emojis.

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ddp
Along with the rest of Southeast Asia...

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ajamesm
"Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website."

then ctrl-W it is, please learn to render plaintext

~~~
current_call
curl is your friend

~~~
ajamesm
<sarcasm>can't see how <i>that</i> would be illegible</sarcasm>

~~~
current_call
Darn, if only there was some program that could render HTML files.

