My feed looks like a daycare

Alistair Croll
1 min readMar 26, 2017

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My android, when posting to Facebook, automatically suggests emoji. If I type “bread”, then the keyboard suggests the bread emoji:

A secondary trend in social networks is space constraint. On Android, Facebook makes short posts look bigger, and lets you choose background color. If you want your whole message to be seen, you probably keep it short so it appears above the “More …” link. And Twitter famously limits posts to 140 characters.

Since an emoji takes less space, automatically offering an emoji replacement for a word is a form of compression. You can fit more text into a sentence fairly easily by replacing common words with their picture.

This is producing far more emoji posts in my feed than happened a month ago. Unintended consequence? Maybe. But it explains why my feed looks like a daycare lately.

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Alistair Croll

Writer, speaker, accelerant. Intersection of tech & society. Strata, Startupfest, Bitnorth, FWD50. Lean Analytics, Tilt the Windmill, HBS, Just Evil Enough.