Ask HN: Left Smiley or Right Smiley?
I've been writing right smileys (ie the 'smile' goes on the right) since first running across them in the heady days of trial-AOL-on-floppy-disk in the early 90s
First saw a left smiley from a Brazilian coworker about 15 years ago (however, none of the other Brazilians I worked with (about 10 overall) used the left smiley)
Since then, I've noticed probably about a 15:85 ratio of left:right smileys in various forms of electronic communication
Does the direction of the smiley mostly depend on nationality/ethnicity of the typer? So far, I have not noticed an overt alignment of smiley direction based on any particular factor, but maybe it's there :)
Which is your preference, and why (if you have a `why`)?
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Right smiley example:
:)
Left smiley example:
(:
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Other than that, I feel the ":" is a better separator between your text, and the initiation of the smiley, given it isn't a "hard line".
My solution is either:
- let the app handle auto-emoji'ing the smiley by doing {smiley} {space} {backspace} {closeparen (or continue on)}
- use a different paired punctuation from parenthesis when I want/need to close multiple levels and/or use smileys
Ponders: I wonder if that's because we read left-to-right. How would a right-to-left reader like an Israeli or Arab see the difference between a left-smiley and a right smiley? I would surmise that a right-to-left reader would prefer a left-smiley.