

The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter - anand-s
https://research.facebook.com/blog/1605690073053884/the-not-so-universal-language-of-laughter/

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Aardwolf
I'm surprised "lol" is so uncommon... only 1.9%. I see it more often than haha
I think... Also no mention of rofl? Or lmao? Or kekeke? Odd...

And by emoji, do they mean the Japanese ones? Because smileys and emoticons
existed long before emoji...

Maybe the facebook users are different than the internet crowd I know (mostly
forums).

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QuantumRoar
I'm sad they didn't show how many people use "teeheehee." I don't know when I
started that habit but now I'm using it occasionally.

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grkvlt
I wonder about geographical and global (that is different countries and
languages) effects. In my experience the 'hehe' or even 'eheh' is a much more
common European statement than the 'haha' of the Anglophone world. I know
Facebook restricted themselves to the US, but a global study would be very
interesting...

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CatsoCatsoCatso
It doesn't say whether Private Messages were analysed, assuming not.

What's frustrating about PMs at the moment on FB is that only on the mobile
apps is it easy to use emojis. The smiley-face link on the messenger.com
interface & the facebook.com domains only provide a choice of "stickers"
(which are awful). So unless you know the keyboard shortcuts off-heart you're
stuck using plaintext.

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QuantumRoar
It does say this as a footnote:

    
    
       "We limit this study to posts and comments and do not look at direct messages through Messenger."

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gyardley
I'd love to know why Wyoming, of all places, appears to use _only_ emoji. Or
is this just a lack of data issue in the least populous state?

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theoh
Yeah, probably a job for De Moivre's equation. I heartily recommend this
chapter on it, covers similar geographical effects:
[http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf](http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf)

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Retric
Stability is a great way to counter this effect. If a county goes up and down
the cancer rate chart then it's probably statistical noise. However, if it's
steadily at the top every decade for 50 years that's likely to have an cause.
Even if it's just an older than normal population.

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josecapurro
"You might have noticed that we cut the plot at 20 letters, but as with any
behavior on the Internet, there is a long tail of laughter lengths. Our
automatic regular expression parser gave up after trying to get through a haha
over 600 letters long! Computers have a long way to go before they can truly
understand the human condition. We weren't laughing that day."

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brudgers
The absence of usenet's "MTN" and "ROTFLMAO" made me wistful.

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josinalvo
Curious that the violin plot is most smooth for the least used expression
(lol)

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salas106
Very funny. Hihi

