Which Emoji Do You Like Most?

“Which emoji do you like most?” Today I was asked a question about my favorite emoji.

If we are talking about the default reactions Facebook provides, the symbols I use most are not actually the Like 👍, but rather the Wow 😦, and the Encouragement 😘 that I love to use when arguing with people.

I once heard an urban legend that on Facebook, using Like to support someone’s post does not really have any boosting effect; it takes a bit more emotion for the system to treat it as a valuable post.

So I do not often hit Like on people’s posts. Only articles I am genuinely interested in get a Wow from me. As for the occasional heckling from passersby, I do not think it is worth spending time on them either. At such times, sending them an Encouragement symbol is really quite self-satisfying, a kind of psychological victory.

As for the most widely used built-in phone emoji set, Emoji, apart from some functional symbols (such as ⭕️❌ and so on) that I use prominently as needed, I personally prefer to use only three emoji: 🫠, 🙃, and 🤣. These three symbols can clearly convey emotional states that are hard to express in words, making them very useful auxiliary symbols.

But in the end, I am personally more of an old-school type, and I actually prefer to use text to convey emotions. Besides expressing things in long sentences, the simplest way, without having to search for graphic symbols, suits a lazy person like me better, so quickly typed words like XD, :P, and “heh” are my most commonly used emotional symbols.

Thinking about it carefully now, when I was still using text symbols heavily, I mostly used them after a long sentence, simply to let the other person understand my tone and avoid misunderstandings. But as Emoji symbols gradually came into heavy use, the things I actually needed to say became fewer and fewer. Often I might just throw an emoji at someone and think that counts as communication. No wonder people often say the internet generation has brought people closer together, yet also made them more like strangers to one another.