#tone indicators

[janmisali]

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

[bomberqueen17]

tone indicators

I reblogged this post without adding any commentary bc queue and not a lot of computer time lately but like okay here's the thing about tone indicators:

they're yet another in-group set of coded speech. like an inside joke, or a meme, or a conlang. if you are in a group that uses them, they're great and perfectly comprehensible.

but if you don't happen to have come from inside a group that uses them, they are exactly as exclusionary as any other heavy jargon or inside joke or acronym. I mean have you ever listened to soldiers talk? The US Army communicates in heavily jargon-ified speech, liberally laden with acronyms, so much so that it's a self-referential joke to make up obscene or deliberately-obfuscated ones to slip into official reports since the sorts of people who'd kick up a fuss about obscene language won't understand them.

It is exactly the same thing. Except that's exclusionary on purpose, and tone indicators are exclusionary in effect but tout themselves as inclusionary.

So if I, an outsider to this, am reading along, and after a sentence, there's a / and then between one and three letters, that is not enough information for me to use to look it up.

This is absolutely inaccessible if you are not alreadhy in the group that uses it.

I wouldn't mind if the people who used them were just like 'oh ha sorry jargon, i'll try to explain if it's not clear, sorry i forget you guys don't know them' just like any other inside joke or meme or whatever.

But I was in a discussion with someone on a Discord and when I was puzzled about them including these weird slash-acronyms after their statements they were like oh how nice for you that you're not neurodivergent and don't need to use these.

Uh no. The opposite actually. I'm the kind of neurodivergent that needs context. I handle being excluded from conversations very poorly. And that's where I get pissed off, that people seem to be holding these up as the new be-all end-all of Finally Solving The Problem Of Ambiguous Tones In Social Interaction. The hell you are, kids. They're just another layer, and I'd say the worst one yet, out of many many many attempts to solve this exact problem. They are fundamentally inaccessible. Don't mistake the fact that you learned them (somewhere, in some context inaccessible to me) for them actually being universal.

Considered against the many different solutions that have been offered since text-only speech was invented, tone indicators stack up as among the very least-accessible of the lot, since they contain so little context in and of themselves-- if a key is not provided then they're totally inaccessible, and are exceptionally difficult for non-native English speakers, and in general require so much memorization or cross-referencing as to be prohibitively hostile to outsiders.

And that's fine, if what your'e doing is just meant for talking to your friends. But don't come into my conversations and berate me for not having memorized whatever incomprehensible set of acronyms you've newly-decided are the new universal truth. And what drives me the most insane is how many of these acronyms someone has now decided to assign a whole new meaning to are acronyms that are well-known and already existed and are in heavy use. So if you try to look them up guess what you get! is it gonna be the newly-created version or the one that's been in use for fifty to seventy-five years??

For one, P.O.S. has had a specific meaning in written and spoken English for a really damn long time and if you call me a piece of shit in the actual language I speak I am absolutely not going to interpret your conlang as having intended something nice. (YES REALLY THEY'RE USING THAT ONE TRY TO GUESS WHAT IT MEANS. NO. NO! I know. Fuck! That's wild. Absolutely the fuck not.)

[a-sip-of-milo]

You're allowed to not like tone tags. You're allowed to feel as though they're infantilising to you. You're allowed to ask that people don't use them when talking to you directly. You're even allowed to say that you don't agree with the concept of them.

What you cannot do is claim that they're not helpful to anyone and talk on behalf of all of us when expressing your feelings on the matter.

Tone tags have saved me from countless arguments. They've provided me with the opportunity to make jokes and participate in banter that I otherwise wouldn't be able to be a part of because of my inability to recognise tone. It's allowed others to joke and banter with me because they know it's not going to cause me any distress.

They have been an absolute life changer. Don't try to make people feel guilty for needing them because you don't personally like them.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[gay-otlc]

When people say they struggle with keeping track of all the tone tags (the ones like /j or /gen), everyone who disregards that by responding "it's just memorizing some abbreviations/acronyms, it's not that hard, stop complaining" is ableist and a fucking hypocrite. If you're going to advocate for accessibility, advocate for accessibility for all of us.

You can't claim to be an ally to neurodivergent and disabled people and then shit on us for our symptoms. If you actually care about helping us, why aren't you listening when we say we struggle with something? It's never okay to tell disabled people they should be able to do something they can't, that it's not that hard, but it's especially not okay if you do so while pretending to support disabled people.

Also, in addition to the "it's not that hard" statement being ableist, it's utter bullshit. There are so many tone tags to keep track of and memorize. I did a quick google search and one of my top results had ninety one tone tags. That's a lot. That's probably a lot even for a neurotypical person, and I'm not a neurotypical person. I struggle to remember a lot of basic, necessary tasks, so I really can't memorize ninety one tone tags.

Especially when some of them are incredibly ambiguous- only one letter? Acronyms or abbreviations at least give you some clues, one letter tone tags are so incredibly confusing. Like, what does /t mean? There are a lot of words that start with T! (This is a rhetorical question. I know /t means "teasing," but I only know the answer because figuring that out was a memorably frustrating experience.)

And /t is just one example of a tone tag I learned because I kept seeing it in conversation and not understanding and being really confused and frustrated. I can't tell you the number of times I've been messaging someone on discord, and they say something with a tone tag I don't recognize, and I just open a new tab to google the meaning, which is where I find lists like the one above. I usually rely on google instead of asking the person what they meant, because I feel stupid and embarrassed for not knowing this code that everyone else seemingly gets.

Which is exactly how it feels when I don't understand someone's tone in real life! Confused and frustrated and ashamed. And tone tags were supposed to help neurodivergent and disabled people not feel that way, so I don't know how we reached a point where they cause those feelings in many of us.

I can't deny that tone tags are a useful accessibility tool for some. If you find them helpful, it's genuinely good that you have that resource. But they're not accessible for all of us. It's incorrect to act like tone tags are a perfect way to communicate, and it's ableist to disregard our struggles with them and tell us to just try harder.

Either listen to those of us who say they have trouble understanding tone tags, or stop pretending you actually give a shit about accessibility.

[agrebel18]

HERE'S A RANDOM GUIDE TO SOME (NOT ALL) TONE INDICATORS IF YOU'RE CONFUSED ABOUT THEM

/j is joking or joke

/hj is half joking or half joke

/srs is serious

/s and /sar is sarcasm

/gen is genuine

/lh is light-hearted

/nm is not mad

/nbh is nobody here

/pos is positive

/neg is negative

there's more but i don't remember them all lmao, feel free to add so we can help each other out!

[booklovertwilight]

As an autistic person, I don't much like tone indicators (e.g., /s, /j, /nm, etc) for a very simple reason. They just replicate my issue with tone in a new medium.

IRL, I have to memorize tones and what they mean, then when I hear words, I need to retroactively change what I think they mean based on the tone.

With these "tone indicators", I need to do the exact same thing. Memorize the little weird acronyms, then when I read words, retroactively change what I think they mean based on the acronym.

Instead, can we actually SAY the words we mean, in the sentence? So instead of:

"hey when will you do the dishes /nm"

write:

"hey, not mad just asking, when will you do the dishes?"

If we really *must* use some kind of indicator, can we change it to a word in parentheses, like that meme? I often do this with short phrases or jokes, such as, "lol I hate you (affectionate)".

[prokopetz]

One of the benefits of writing like you're Victor Fucking Hugo is that the need for tone indicators never really comes up; anybody who manages to wend their way through the Frankensteinian maze of dependent clauses and parenthetical asides which you've inflicted upon them is going to come out the other side knowing exactly how you feel about the topic at hand.

[hiro-doodlez]

LIST OF ENGLISH ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS (the random letters that people use sometimes)!! FEEL FREE TO USE AS A REF (reference) SHEET!! In alphabetical too!!

Tone indicators at the bottom!

GENERAL:

AFK- away from keyboard

AKA- also known as

ASAP- as soon as possible

ASL- American Sign Language

B4- before

BC- because

BF- boyfriend

BFF- best friends forever

BTW- By the way

BTS- Behind the scenes/back to school / that one band

BRB- be right back

CW: content warning

Cya- see ya

DM- direct message

DW- dont worry

EZPZ- easy peasy

FB- Facebook

FW: flash warning

FAQ- frequently asked questions

FYI- for your information

GF- girl friend

GG- good game

GJ- Good job

GL- good luck

Gnite- good night

GTFO- get the fuck out

GTG- got to go

Gud- good

H8- hate

HBD- happy birthday

Hella- really

HMU- Hit me up

HW- Homework

IDK- I don't know

IDC- I don't care

IG- I guess / instagram

IK- I know

IKR- I know right

K- okay

Lmao- laughing my ass off

Kewl- cool

Kk- okay

Lol- laugh out loud

ILY- I love you

ILYSM- I love you so much

IMO- in my opinion

IRL- in real life

IYKYK- if you know you know

JFC- Jesus fucking chrkst

Jk- just kidding

L8R- later

LMAO- laughing my ass off

LMK-let me know

LOL- laughing out loud

Mkay- mm okay

NE- Any

NE1- anyone

NGL- not gonna lie

NM- Nothing much

NP: no problem

NSFW- not safe for work

NVM- nevermind

NW- no worries

Obv- obviously

OFC- of course

OMW- on my way

OP- original post(er)

OTP- one true pairing

Ova- over

Pic- picture

Pls-please

Plz-please

POV: point of view

Ppl- people

Prolly- probably

QOTD- quote of the day

R- are

RB- reblog

Ref- reference

Rly- really

RN- right now

RP- role play

RPG-role playing game

RT- retweet

Sec- second

SH- self harm

SMH- shaking my head

SMP- survival multiplayer server (Minecraft) / social media platform (?)

S.O- significant other

Sui- suicide

Sus- suspicious

STFU- shut the fuck up

T- testosterone

TBA- to be announced

TBF- to be fair

TBH- to be honest

TF- the fuck

Thnks- thanks

Thx- thanks

TLDR- too long didn't read (usually a summary)

TMRW- tomorrow

TOS- terms of service

TTYL-talk to you later

TW: trigger warning

Vid- video

WTF- what the fuck

WYD- what are you doing?

YOLO- You only live once

YT- YouTube

YW- you're welcome

—————

If the one youre looking for isnt here, either i forgot or its a fandom! Id suggest looking it up if youre confused!

Extra note: if you see 8 in one of the acronyms, then it usually is used as an “ate” sound. So h8= ate, gr8= great ect.

—————

TONE INDICATORS:

/aff- affectionate

/c- copypasta

/cb- clickbait (?)

/f- fake

/gen- genuine

/genq- genuine question

/half joking

/ij- inside joke

/j- joking

/lyr- lyrics

/lh- light hearted

/lu- little upset

/neg- negative

/nf- not forced

/nm- not mad

/npa- not passive aggresive

/nsrs- not serious

/p- platonic

/pa- passive aggresive

/pos- positive

/q- quote

/r- romantic

/ref

/s- sarcastic

/srs- serious

/t- teasing

/th- threat

I HOPE THIS HELPS!! and if i forgot to add one feel free to send an ask ^^

[meowtismz]

Kiki need be one say it apparently.

TONE. TAGS. NOT. HELPFUL

Sorry be aggressive but see time and time again those NOT LISTEN!!! Vlaim be ND advocate activist.... but is NOT LISTEN. Tone tags be very VERY confusibg for so many of us MSN and HSN autistics. And to those have memory issues :[ is so hard memorizing all of tone tags. Not just hard but impossible so confusing and some imply literally NOTHING.

LIKE /HJ HOW USE THAT???? half joke??? So is not serious but also not joke???? :/

Yeah uhm, do better and just type [joke] or sum

[snailsdraw]

[Start ID: 3 pages of HLVRAI doodles exploring the idea of Benrey using tone indicators and Tommy's use of quasi-auditory emoticons. The last 2 are a comic narrative.

When he spots Benrey reaching for a soda, Tommy sternly tells him, "Uh- no, Benrey. Don't. Touch. That," followed by somehow enunciating a copypasted emoji that looks like two eyes hovering in the darkness. Benrey backs off and goes, "okay, geeez. why you mad? /g" Tommy then explains, looking very pleased with himself, "I'm not! I'm testi- testing out a new [REDACTED] and it's working pretty uhfect- effectively :D!" Said [REDACTED] refers to the earlier eyes emoji. In a separate scenario, Tommy explains his emoticon usage to Gordon, saying, "There's uh- a subtle difference between :o, :0, and :O," to which Gordon, disturbed out of his mind at how Tommy had even managed to speak that, whispers to himself, "I…I understand that. Why do I understand that??" And in the last scenario in this page, Gordon and Tommy happen upon something terrible and unfathomable. Gordon, with a blank almost-smile, utters in a light-headed way, "I'm going insane. I am going. Insane. I'm just gonna go lie down now." Meanwhile, Tommy has since stopped processing what he was looking at and is rapidly skipping straight to just accepting the reality of it. All he says is, ":0"

Benrey asks Gordon, "yo, why d'you tie your hair all tight like that? used to look all soft 'n nice 'n shit /pos" His hand is reached upwards to where Gordon's hair is tied back neat and flat against his skull, and Gordon swats it away, annoyed. "Does it LOOK like I've got time for some sorta- what- FASHION STATEMENT? I'm trying to survive, man! How the hell am I supposed to see with my hair comin' down like that?" In a split second moment of realisation though, Gordon's tone shifts to something more accusatory, "Oh, but of course you'd LOVE THAT, wouldn't you? Cuz I wouldn't see YOU comin' then, would I?" Benrey just rolls his eyes and folds his arms, "ughhh, bro chill. "/pos", remember? i was complementing you. Gordon Forget-man." That claim has Gordon laughing in disbelief. "Yeah, sure. And last I checked, you got my ARM cut off. But that's no big deal, right? That's fine, that's cool, and an okay thing to happen."

Benrey gives him a strange look. "…bro, you bein' /s right now, or- " but Gordon cuts him off and tells him, "I'm not talking to you anymore."

End ID.]

[Open-mouth emoticons: ":o" indicates a casual tone, a statement with no threat ":0" indicates a slight botheredness, OR complete blankness ":O" indicates enthusiasm or an amplified emotion]

I just like my open-mouth emoticon tone indicator substitutes :)

[janmisali]

the /hj tone indicator is worse than useless

[strange-nd-creature]

Tone tags

[catgirl-catboy]

My personal opinion on tone tags (since there are a fair few people talking about them in the notes of my posts today) is that they work great on sites like twitter, where you have a limited character count. However, on sites like tumblr, I think it's more accessible to write tone clarifications like this:

I love your shirt (genuine)

I love your shirt (sarcastic)

and it can also lead to absolutely batshit wild ones like I love your shirt (planning to steal it later)

They aren't a bad accessibility tool, just one frequently used out of context.

[greetings-inferiors]

lol and lmao are tone indicators

[defectivegembrain]

People have conflicting access needs and I respect people who find tone indicators, shortened or full word, helpful, and I respect those who find them confusing and also those who are indifferent or a mixture, but then there are people who are like actually the concept of tone indicators broke into my house, held a gun to my head, and called me an ableist slur, and you're supporting that if you don't just learn to read tone like a neurotypical