How to stop emoticons from changing to emojis in Discord

If you’re tired of Discord automatically turning your simple emoticons like “:(” into emojis, here’s how you can stop it. It’s pretty straightforward but can be a game-changer for those who prefer the classic feel of text emoticons over full-blown emojis.

First off, you need to dive into your settings. Go to your Discord’s user settings by clicking on the gear icon next to your username at the bottom left of the screen. Once you’re in there, look for the “Chat” option in the left sidebar. Click on it, and you’ll find a toggle labeled “Automatically convert emoticons in your message to emoji.” Just switch that off, and voila, you’re back to using good old text emoticons without any automatic conversion to emojis.

For those who might not want to dig into the settings, there’s also a quick workaround: you can add a backslash \ before your emoticon. For example, typing \:( will display it as “:(” without turning it into an emoji. This trick works for other formatting features in Discord, too, since the backslash acts as an “escape” character.

This setting has been a lifesaver for long-time Discord users who don’t want their carefully crafted text to lose its intended tone. As one Reddit user recently said, “Thank you so freaking much, this was getting on my nerves, and I’ve used Discord since 2016.”

If you’ve already turned off this setting years ago, like one Redditor pointed out, you might have forgotten it was even a thing. Still, Discord could probably make this feature opt-in rather than default. It’s a minor tweak, but for those who care about text purity (or just miss old-school internet vibes), it’s worth a couple of clicks.

So whether you’re a new user or a veteran who just found this annoying quirk, now you know how to take control of your emoticons. Go ahead, type your “:(” in peace!