A whole gaggle of once-popular emoji seem to be falling out of favor among texters and others, according to a new report. So now you can see if your faves made the list of the world’s most unpopular emoji.
And what happens to deeply unpopular emoji, anyway?
World’s most unpopular emoji: The ones most in danger of going ‘extinct’
Once popular emoji that are now in danger of going “extinct” — or, more likely, just never used and gradually forgotten — as emoji use varies considerably by generation and new emojis grow in popularity as older ones fade, according to analysis by Superside, a creative subscription service.
Superside implies extinction in its report, but the use of the word appears to mean little more than “unpopular” and/or “unused.” That’s because the Unicode Consortium considers approved emoji permanent per its global encoding standard for characters and symbols, so there is really no such thing as extinction for emoji. (Hat tip to Cult of Mac‘s D. Griffin Jones for that: “They will never remove an emoji,” he emphasized.)
Analyzing the world’s most unpopular emoji
Superside said it pulled the 100 most popular emoji from 2013 to present day and analyzed which have fallen in popularity by rank. That’s how it determined which emojis have the highest probability of “going extinct.”
Using KeywordTool.io, Superside analyzed which emoji were searched for the least in every country in the world and popular cities across the United States to learn which ones are falling in favor by region.
And according to some sources, younger generations don’t find emoji cool at all anymore, so this list of unpopular little icons might get a lot longer in the near future.
Top 3 stinkers
“We found out that the 👌 ‘okay hand’ emoji takes the No. 1 spot for most unpopular emoji globally, dropping 66 places in its ranking since 2013,” Superside said. “The 😳 ‘flushed face’ and 🙌 ‘person raising both hands in celebration’ emojis take the second and third spots.”
“These once-popular emojis are losing their shine as users favor other emojis — likely due to the launch of newer, more relatable emojis and certain ones being used as symbols within hate groups,” it added.
14 least popular emoji
Photo: Superside
In addition to singling out the world’s most unpopular emoji, Superside also pointed at emoji it appears to have designed that could gain popularity, like “Dad bod” and “Gamer.” Of course you can download them as stickers.
