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It had been some times I joined Stackoverflow. And it is really a massive stage for knowledge sharing.

Stackexchange posts support Markdown syntax. In GitHub Markdown we can insert Emoji. Like if we write-

:octocat: :+1: :book:

these appear-

Does Stackexchange have something like this?

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16
  • 1
    Not as far as I know and I don't see any need for Emojis in a professional website like Stack Overflow. Comments maybe spammed with Emojis otherwise.
    – Harry
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:27
  • 3
    @Harry Do you mean that Emojis are unprofessional???
    – Kamal
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:29
  • 12
    My personal opinion - Yes. I feel they belong to social networking sites and not a site like Stack Overflow. I could be in the minority though :)
    – Harry
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:30
  • 4
    GitHub is a place for collaborative software development & it has more than 1700 Emojis. :)
    – Kamal
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:36
  • 5
    Just because GitHub has something it doesn't mean it becomes professional. I have certainly never seen people use Emojis (or any such things) in a professional document or a mail or a letter. Anyway, its just my opinion (and its not going to change based on what GitHub does). Good luck on this feature request :)
    – Harry
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:38
  • 1
    If this is asking for Emojis to be added just on Stack Overflow, then it is off topic here and should be asked on that specific site meta. If this is requesting a network wide change, then arguments like "professional website" can be done only for specific sites, since some of them are more informal (think Anime.SE) and may actually want emoji. That said, probably one should ask for site specific changes on sites where they could be appropriate. I wouldn't hold my hope up, though, it doesn't seem likely that the system will get updated just for a single site...
    – SPArcheon
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:43
  • @Derpy: Yes, my comments were specific to Stack Overflow.
    – Harry
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:46
  • Quite easy guidance here: your text should be easily interpreted by a machine. No soup for you. :)
    – gwr
    Mar 17, 2016 at 8:51
  • I delete them, with prejudice, from any post I see them in. I leave them here only because they are the subject of the question. I'm guessing they get added by people asking questions on their phones.
    – Catija
    Mar 17, 2016 at 13:26
  • Please don't deface your question.
    – rene
    Mar 17, 2016 at 14:06
  • you can't. Once posted it stays if the community feels it has value. You can flag your post for a moderator and ask for dissociation but that isn't done in all cases. There isn't much to worry about. You have to do a lot worse to get post-banned here on MSE.
    – rene
    Mar 17, 2016 at 14:09
  • Only -16 so far, that isn't that bad. I've seen worse.
    – rene
    Mar 17, 2016 at 14:15
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    You've learned now that on feature requests you have to be a bit more careful. Because on those questions the voters use the down votes to signal do not implement this feature. From the help On posts tagged feature-request, voting indicates agreement or disagreement with the proposed change rather than just the quality or usefulness of the post itself.
    – rene
    Mar 17, 2016 at 14:18
  • 3
    Given that most of communication is non-verbal, it becomes more important to have a symbolic means of expression such as emoji. :+1: for emoji support ;-)
    – TrinitronX
    Jun 11, 2019 at 19:58
  • 4
    you could use this site for copy and pasting emoji in StackOverflow;s sites like this: 💆🏻‍
    – Soheil Paper
    Jun 20, 2019 at 6:41

2 Answers 2

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17

No, such things should not exist in StackOverflow IMO.

In Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites, it is important to have messages readable and simple. Adding salute or greetings like Hello guys or Thanks for your help is strongly discouraged since they have no positive effect on making a post more readable or understandable.

A question or an answer should contain anything it needs to make itself clear, nothing more. And Emoji will have no positive effect for this purpose.

On the other hand, they are quite distracting. When you look at a post, first thing you saw should be the written code followed by the explanatory text, not fancy emojis.

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    Agreed, like I said IMHO "emoji" would only have reason to exist on sites with very specific subcultures, likely Anime.SE and maybe a few more. Even then, I would chose custom emotes related to the specific site instead of standard, generic ones. Even there, it would probably make more sense to have emotes enabled in the chat rooms, not on the main site.
    – SPArcheon
    Mar 17, 2016 at 10:02
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    I think things have changed a bit now, you use them to express otherwise missed sentiment, it helps avoid getting crossed-wires in conversations. They are very useful for this. 😙
    – n00dles
    Aug 2, 2022 at 0:33
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see stackexchange as a social network of extraordinary and genius peoplen

You are wrong. Stack Exchange is a network of Q/A sites, not a social network.

Hence, emoji are not supported since it ads fluff to posts and that defeats the purpose of the sites: clear-cut questions and answers.

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4
  • I did not ever say- it is a "a social network". I said- I like to be on stackexchange more than fb or g+ or twitter. Programmers meet here, they ask questions, share knowledge, vote posts; they get to know- what is happening around the world, which is the new technology, what others are working on.... that's it.
    – Kamal
    Mar 17, 2016 at 9:05
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    You did.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Mar 17, 2016 at 9:07
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    I said - how I feel not what it is.
    – Kamal
    Mar 17, 2016 at 9:08
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    StackOverflow puts in contact job seekers with talent seekers. That sounds al whole lot like social networking. It is Q/A site, it is a capitalist enterprise and it is also to some degree a social network.
    – Anonymous Coward
    Feb 7, 2017 at 20:04

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