HACKER Q&A
📣 warrenm

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:

(:

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
The most common I have seen is right-aligned but I dont know if any smiley parsers get confused with left-aligned. I have no preference. ʕ-ᴥ-ʔ Perhaps someone tracks this in some emoji parsing standard?
👤 xafloc
I've been a 100% "right" smiley person myself. However, I've struggled with how I place a smile within parens, without the smiley inadvertently closing out the open paren. Perhaps I need to add the left smiley into my repertoire for a slight increase of clarity. (E.g., Like so (: )

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".

👤 simonblack
Definitely a right-smiley.

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.

👤 mmphosis
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