Yes it does. If you don’t believe this, just go onto those biggest, most influential discussion boards or forums, comment or reply on a popular thread with a “^o^” emoticon at the end of your sentence. Wait for a couple of hours, then check your comment again and you will experience the hate, i guarantee.

Although emoticons give digital texts a higher level of media richness as emoticons re-present different human facial expressions, most internet users find them childish. You could take a look at the discussion threads in those leading internet forums and you won’t find any emoticons in any of the replies. If you happened to find one, then you will see tons of users teasing and mocking that particular user. Even though the rules of the forums did not state that emoticons are strictly forbidden, there are shared understandings among the users to avoid using emoticons or even to hate emoticons.

This does not only happen in the English speaking countries, it is also very common in the internet world of Hong Kong. The image above was a conversation taken from one of the biggest internet forums in Hong Kong – Hong Kong Golden Forum. The user “bmth” asked a question with a emoticon “=.=” at the end of the sentence, clearly unaware of the fact that internet users hate emoticons. Then the user “游離分子” replied to “bmth”‘s comment saying “( Show Blocked User – bmth )”, showing “bmth” that he has been blocked because he used an emoticon. 

The possible reason of the internet users hating emoticons is that they think emoticons are childish and immature. Using emoticons is especially popular among teenagers. Huffaker and Calvert have proven it true, they have found that teenagers are more likely to use emoticons than adults. Therefore, using emoticon became a childish and immature move in the eyes of adult internet users.

Come to think of it, I used to use a lot of emoticons to communicate with people online or via mobile phones too when I was a teenager, but now I find them childish and annoying just like what those fellow internet users think. I didn’t force myself to get rid of the habit of using emoticons and hate them, it just happened naturally. And imagine when you are reading a thread about, say, economic policies which is full of serious comment and suddenly you come across a comment like “I agree! The government should cut taxes XD”. How would you feel about it?

What the internet also hates is the excessive use of online language e.g. acronyms, abbreviations etc. There are only so much commonly acceptable acronyms and abbreviations in the “adult internet world” such as tbo, imo, brb etc. But when it comes to the teenagers, there are countless acronyms and abbreviations. And these phrases are not standardized. Using too many words into acronym and abbreviation forms makes the texts end up looking meaningless like a bunch of  random letters combined together, it will be difficult to comprehend and it would take a lot of effort to read it. Just try reading the youtube comment above and see if you can understand what that person was talking about. If you do, I strongly suggest you joining user “13579jams”‘s science team.

Here is an example of how the internet hates how people are using acronyms excessively and try to make fun of them. There is a popular online acronym “OMGWTFBBQ” that stands for “oh my god what the f**k barbecue*. It is more or less a jumble of meaningless acronyms or gibberish. The phrase is the parody of the popular internet acronym “omg” and “wtf”. But this phrase is actually created to mock the excessive use of the acronyms “OMG” and “WTF” (in caps, girls like exaggerating) of teenage girls.

The excessive use of one of the online laguage – letter homophones, caused problems that bother the internet users too. It is very common to see people use “u” to stand for “you”, “r” to stand for “are”, “ur” to stand for “your” and “u r” to stand for “you are”. But they are all combined by the same two alphabets, and as I mentioned before, the way the type is not standardized. People always mix them up and cause huge confusion, e.g. using “ur” to stand for both “your” and “you’re”. When it was so excessively used, it even affects people’s ability to spell the original form correctly.

Many users are concerned about the worsening grammar standard on the internet, and they took action to correct them. Those internet users who constantly point out other users’ grammatical mistakes are called Grammar Nazi. The image above is a good example of this. The top part of the image is a screen capture from tumblr which is a very popular site among teenagers. There was a photo with the caption “IMAGINE YOUR HERE”. Clearly, the original poster wanted to say “IMAGINE YOU’RE HERE”, so an internet user added the bottom part image to the original image to correct the poster.

It is kind of ironic how internet users hate emoticons and online language when these two things came from the internet. Even though internet is free and you can be anonymous there, it still has rules.