Ask HN: Since when does Craigslist's front page have emojis?
Now, Craigslist, as a legacy of the 1990s web, has for a long time stubbornly maintained its minimalist style, to the point where several "modern" startups have popped up to try and offer Craigslist-like services to new generations.
So why this change? And what's with the timing? It's coinciding with the wanton proliferation of emojis everywhere courtesy of everyone's favorite GPT. At a time where people are beginning to feel emoji fatigue, Craigslist, of all places, has decided to put them front and center.
Has Craigslist succumbed to the modern algorithmic context of competing for attention? Is this a small concession so they can largely keep their legacy look while still participating in the zeitgeist?
When and with what intention was this emoji introduction initiated?
And most importantly, how do you feel about the entire thing?
I think OP is reading into it too much , it seems like a minor embellishment and I never personally correlated emojis with LLMs.
Without seeing how it looked before I think this just gives a little bit more of clue about what each category is about. They are still being used sparsely.
The only thing where it irks me to find emojis is in cli apps. They use to not be the same character width as the monofont I use so they either look chopped or they displace their nearing text.
I would say it's actually exactly the kind of thing they would do - stick with plain text over things that load slower like images.
Emojis are great for that, they're plain unicode text!
Good user experience isn't about dogmatically sticking to "text only", but about making a useful, understandable, navigable site.
Emojis seem to help section the dozens of links on the homepage without adding unnecessary visual distraction or page payload.
I think I personally see emojis used in this manner as unnecessary visual distraction, because it detracts from whatever self-consistent design system you had going on (when used for high visibility items like front page headings). Emojis don't even render the same on every platform, so its a move that dilutes your design language.
Even if it's a useful visual guide, I would wager nine times out of ten you'd be better off with a self-consistent icon set...depending on what you're going for, of course.
This is a feature, not a bug. That it's using your platform-specific emojis makes it easier to scan, since it's the ideograms you are already accustomed to. Much faster to scan familiar symbols than to read each section heading serially.
If you design an interface when some actions are only behind icons/emojis (no text, no hover title), expect users like me to click on them just to see what they do.
I feel about as strongly as I do about the font that Google use
I will never understand this visceral reaction that emojis provoke in some people
It's shocking that a 1 bedroom apartment now rents for $4-5k/month....
Are they? News to me. I like them. Do they show up in Lynx or whatever terminal-based browser the hip kids are using these day are using?
1: How many people don’t delete Facebook because of it? When I left Facebook for good, losing access to Marketplace felt like a real sacrifice.
It was worse in a rural village here in Alaska, where everything was on Facebook, much to my dismay. But the upside of a small community is that I heard about things anyway via word-of-mouth.
Language has shifted. It’s ridiculous to try to pretend it’s upsetting it even novel at this point.
What’s really odd is places that specifically don’t support emojis nowadays.