We can pick between the two remaining hypotheses by looking at whether people are ending thier tweets with a clap emoji. As it turns out, the answer is “yes”, more often than not. So if we look back at our hypotheses about how emoji are used, we can see right off the bat that three of them are wrong: The up-down-up-down pattern means that people are alternating the clap emoji with one word. (BTW, big shoutout to Hadley Wickham’s emo(ji) package for letting me include emoji in plots!)įrom this we can see a clear pattern: almost no one starts a tweet with an emoji, but most people follow the first word with an emoji. The yellow portion is the words that aren’t. The red portion of the bar are the words that are the clap emoji. The “word” axis represents which word in the tweet we’re looking at: the first, second, third, etc. Finally, I looked at each word in a tweet and marked whether it was a clap or not. (This may seem pretty small compared to my starting dataset, but there were a lot of retweets in there, and I didn’t want to count anything twice.) Then I removed since those show up in the beginning of any tweet that’s a reply to someone, and URL’s, which I don’t really think of as “words”. If you search for “blob” and “blob blob” you’ll get the same set of results.)įrom that set of 10,000 tweets, I took only the tweets that had a clap emoji followed by a word followed by another clap emoji and threw out any repeats. (Twitter doesn’t let you search for a certain number of matches of the same string.
![applause emoji applause emoji](https://media2.giphy.com/media/ZdNlmHHr7czumQPvNE/giphy.gif)
I used Fireant to grab 10,000 tweets from the Twitter streaming API which had the clap emoji in them at least once. I’m not aiming to write an internet style guide, but I am hoping to characterize this phenomena in a general way: this is how most people who do this do it, and if you want to use this style in a natural way, you should probably do it the same way. I want to know which of these best describes what people actually do.
![applause emoji applause emoji](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix.iemoji.com/images/emoji/apple/ios-12/256/clapping-hands-medium-light-skin-tone.png)
Claps ? are used ? between phrases ? not words.
![applause emoji applause emoji](https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--ceQm-2Jq--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_fit,g_north_west,h_954,w_954/co_5e366e,e_outline:48/co_5e366e,e_outline:inner_fill:48/co_ffffff,e_outline:48/co_ffffff,e_outline:inner_fill:48/co_bbbbbb,e_outline:3:1000/c_mpad,g_center,h_1260,w_1260/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_auto,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1558294489/production/designs/4880663_0.jpg)