tone tags are such an interesting phenomenon linguistically. bc they're of course intended to add clarity to text communication, in a way that's more explicit than nonverbal signals, but they're also more removed from the message than verbal signals are -- arguably more removed than nonverbal signals are too, bc they're so constructed.
and that distance gets in the way of efficacy, from my perspective -- like there's a reason we spontaneously developed emoticons extremely early on in the internet days (and eventually latched onto emojis so hard), and ~*~wAyS tO eVOkE tOnE~*~, and the ones that caught on are the iconic [in the linguistic sense, ie resembling the concepts they evoke] ones bc they can be guessed.
and i think there's also a reason that when speaking out loud we don't just say what we want to say and then add "genuine" or "not mean" at the end as if speaking it makes it so -- we use full sentences like "I'm really not trying to be mean here." that's the part that really interests me, the abstraction of concepts that have never been just about tone, have always needed carefully chosen words to be expressed at least sometimes. that's where i think tone tags are distinctly less effective than just writing out the sentence for someone to read as part of the message and not as an abstracted layer on top of the message. (whereas with stuff like /lh for lighthearted i kinda get it -- i still find a well-chosen emoticon or emoji does a much better job at making me read a message in a lighthearted tone, but i get the desire to be explicit.)
ik this reads like a critique even though i started out saying it was just interesting, and idk it's both. i think the desire to implement a completely explicit tone layer on top of messages is fascinating, and i think its failure states are also fascinating, and im not about to grump at people for using an imperfect tool bc they're all imperfect.
