Really wish skintone+gender emoji variants weren't an option in Slack.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
jameshart 15 hours ago [-]
I sympathize. But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow; while all the other Star Wars characters they had already made yellow without a second thought rather gave the game away that maybe yellow minifigs are actually white people. And it’s not a fluke: The Simpsons are exactly the same.
The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
noAnswer 10 minutes ago [-]
> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.
sssilver 2 hours ago [-]
> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis.
As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.
lmm 10 hours ago [-]
> Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow
Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.
decimalenough 8 hours ago [-]
Because he wouldn't be recognizable? It would be like making Yoda pink or R2D2 black.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
It's really weird how this particular kind of racism is not only acceptable in the current zeitgeist but enforced as dogma. Why is anyone's skin color their most important defining characteristic?
This feels more like virtue signaling than any kind of reason: This kind of logic lets you forever find new kinds of racism that you can then make performative fights against so that you can ignore real issues that plague the world.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
I think of skin colour like hair colour: it doesn't really mean anything, yet people still have degrading stereotypes; and changing it can make someone hard to recognise, especially in cases where a person is being caricatured anyway (which is lego but also Funko Pop).
Take these images, how recognisable would any of the characters (those with hair) be with different hair?
Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
Not disagreeing, but as a bonus they can reuse the head and hair pieces for Tom Selleck in any Magnum, P.I. sets they might make.
Findecanor 11 hours ago [-]
LEGO is different from The Simpsons in that LEGO bricks for a long time were limited to seven colours: the four primary colours, white, black and light grey.
The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.
saurik 10 hours ago [-]
We should go with purple. Nobody is even close to being purple. Hell: depending on your semantics, purple isn't even a real color. (Blue, of course, might should be reserved for AIs ;P.)
account42 3 hours ago [-]
The trap is thinking that because some creative works have made the mistake of assigning realistic skin tones to some characters based on race that we now need to repeat the same instead of learning from it.
aendruk 15 hours ago [-]
Is it specified that semantically neutral appear yellow or is the color free to vary by implementation/user preference?
jameshart 15 hours ago [-]
Unicode says
> When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).
The “LEGO (race) problem” was only a problem once LEGO began licensing IP (it was NBA first, not Star Wars, actually) and had to make minifigs to match real people. Before that, minifigs were perfectly raceless, able to abstractly represent whatever sort of characters that children could imagine—just like the yellow emojis.
Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.
Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.
jameshart 14 hours ago [-]
I apologize, you don’t seem to have followed my argument.
Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later.
The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando.
They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it.
As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’.
My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.
inanutshellus 14 hours ago [-]
It's funny, because I think of emojis as entirely co-opted from the Japanese and so see the images in that context not having anything to do with LEGO or The Simpsons. The Japanese were SO COOL and ... lucky? with their extensive creativity making of the original text emojis that folk wanted to play along too... so picture emoijs came along.
adamrezich 14 hours ago [-]
It's all downstream of yellow smiley faces (1950s)—raceless ideograms conveying a common emotion (happiness) that humans of all races happen to share—and I honestly have no idea how this seems to escape everyone today.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
It's actually quite simple: warriors are useless outside a war so they tend to go looking for one.
inanutshellus 14 hours ago [-]
Oh I agree. They're from the gold smiley face stickers extrapolated to more emotions. I meant that I _don't_ connect the gold to Simpsons and LEGO. I just connect the whole emoji concept to the Japanese and thus don't consider anything about it at all to be "white-centric". Once you do associate the smiley faces with LEGO/Simpsons then you do start to make these connections that... just don't need to be there and let the conversation get muddled in drama.
jameshart 14 hours ago [-]
Weird that you’re perceiving this as ‘drama’. I fear you think that this issue is in some way political.
I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy.
I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
skissane 10 hours ago [-]
Historically the colour “yellow” was associated with East Asian people, not people of European descent-who for whatever reason got associated with the colour “white”, despite the fact European skin colour is more pinky/peachy (but getting more “olive” as one heads south). And keep in mind emoji were invented in Japan, where I don’t think anybody was thinking “yellow smiley face=European ancestry”
jameshart 8 hours ago [-]
So there's a peculiar thing happening here.
I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives.
Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably.
That is a misreading of what I said.
The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case.
So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc.
Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy?
Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
skissane 8 hours ago [-]
> I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
Are you talking about “Western culture”, or “progressive-leaning US(-centric) culture”? Because the idea that a colour choice made in Japan has some kind of racial meaning is much more strongly associated with the second than the first.
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
I don't see anyone misreading you that way.
When people talk about the history of emojis, they're giving evidence that yellow isn't white. They're not accusing you of saying anything about history.
francislavoie 12 hours ago [-]
It's not political so much as people of color want to use emojis they identify with, and it's very common for them not to identify with yellow because it's so much further from their own skin tone than yellow is to caucasians and asians
nomdep 7 hours ago [-]
Emojis are about ideas. Believing that a skin color can tell everything there is about you (and thus "identifying" with one) is incredibly racist.
aydyn 8 hours ago [-]
Whats weird that you, as a white man, feel the need to speak on behalf of people of color.
You dont need to do that.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
Pretending that emoticons are a Japanese invention is also a weird kind of historical revisionism.
taejo 1 hours ago [-]
Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons).
BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.
philwelch 8 hours ago [-]
Lego only started licensing in 1999, and by the time they fully embraced it they had almost completely rejected their entire product philosophy. What really happened is that, by 2003, the company had been taken over by entirely different people who cared more about how much money they could make from licensing deals than about the original vision of their product. (Things have since improved marginally, partly as a response to backlash.)
Atlas667 11 hours ago [-]
I dont think you understood his comment. He's right.
And not because they intentionally made yellow into white, but because they unintentionally made it so.
It's exactly the same as being an american vs being an african-american. You don't call white americans european-americans. Society (or media) assigned a racial default.
I'm gonna be a little more forward with this last argument: This is the product of mixed societies that have not dealt with racial bias and/or the consequences of racism well.
philwelch 8 hours ago [-]
If you interpret the term “American” to only refer to white people, maybe you’re the one with racial problems.
Atlas667 4 hours ago [-]
You're missing the point. "American" can be interpreted as racially neutral, but then why is "african-american" very common, but using "european-american" is almost non existent?. Same as "native-american".
The fact is that there already exists a racial default, I didn't make it, it simply exists due to the nuances of our society, its history and/or its media.
I didn't invent either term and I am not THE dictionary.
This is how these terms are interpreted by the world and also through simple logic. I am not the one who interprets these terms and their usage.
American society and culture is still severely segregated due to how crappily it dealt with the consequences of its racist history.
White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
We're not talking about pure logic of meaning, we're talking about social usage of terms.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
> You're missing the point. "American" can be interpreted as racially neutral, but then why is "african-american" very common, but using "european-american" is almost non existent?
Because in the current ((zeitgeist)) Europeans are not allowed to have a racial identity.
freehorse 29 minutes ago [-]
"European" is a racial identity more in the americas than in europe.
adammarples 15 hours ago [-]
One doesn't have to have influenced the other, it's just pretty obvious that Matt Groening and the mostly white 70's Danes chose yellow as a cartoonish white skin colour surrogate, it's not a fluke, as the other commenter says.
adamrezich 14 hours ago [-]
Honest question: do you see Caucasian features in the default yellow smiley face ideogram?
When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?
When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
jameshart 14 hours ago [-]
Well now you’re bringing white supremacy into a conversation that is more about white defaultism.
Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda.
The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version.
And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
rmunn 12 hours ago [-]
So when white people have emojis available that more accurately reflect their skin tone than the neutral-yellow one, and yet they prefer to use the one that DOESN'T reflect their skin tone nearly as well, to me that's pretty strong evidence that it is racially neutral, at least in their perception.
And really, when you're talking about perceived racial overtones of emojis, "in their perception" is what matters, isn't it? There's no objective, 2+2=4 truth that we can point to in this particular argument, as there is in some arguments, because it's all about what subtext different people are reading into things. The objective truth is that those pixels are a certain color; the perception of them is subjective, varying from person to person.
And while some people prefer to use emojis that reflect their skin tone (whether it's lighter or darker), others prefer to use the yellow emojis instead of the ones that would better reflect their skin tone. The fact that they chose that color when they had other options available suggests strongly that they are trying to communicate a "skin tone doesn't matter in the context of this communication" message.
You are arguing that the yellow color isn't inherently neutral, but I claim that you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Even if the yellow color isn't inherently as neutral as it was intended to be, the fact that people are choosing it over colors that would more accurately reflect their skin tone means that it is neutral enough for the purpose.
adamrezich 14 hours ago [-]
> The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are.
A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
> The yellow emoji is not perceived as neutral by either Black or White readers. On average, both groups perceive it as more likely to index a White identity, and we find this effect to be stronger among White readers.
ryandrake 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this could be solved by just making the default emoji green or blue or something.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
The advantage of a neutral color is that it can be whatever you want in your local theme. Back when they were images supplied by the respective forum/etc. instead of giant fonts that only mega-corporations can afford to maintain it was not uncommon to have emoticons styled and colored differently to match the site theme and/or subject matter instead of the standard yellow.
TheCycoONE 11 hours ago [-]
Skeeter is blue but represents black; Ice king is blue but almost certainly white. I don't know where Megamind fits in; and the Smurfs are almost certainly 'other'.
I think you're onto something.
adamrezich 11 hours ago [-]
It shouldn't be a surprise that these would be the findings of post-hoc research done in 2021, long after skin-tone modifiers were made available and in common use, rather than research that was done before skin-tone modifiers were added to the standard, so as to justify the additional complexity and possible nth-order societal effects of adding them—which, as far as I can tell, does not exist.
Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.
f33d5173 8 hours ago [-]
Yellow doesn't represent anything, it represents nothing. It's a blank hole that people can fill in with their biases. White people will picture it to be white, black people can imagine it being black. That becomes a problem when you want to represent a black character, to a bunch of white people, who consider him being black an important part of his character. In other words it's (very deliberately) a bad tool for talking about race.
sedatk 11 hours ago [-]
> It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up
You're also continuously broadcasting your skintone and gender in the office simply by existing. Is that inappropriate and unprofessional too?
suddenlybananas 22 minutes ago [-]
I don't have to type my race when I write an email.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
You don't make a statement that your skin tone is relevant simply by existing.
philwelch 8 hours ago [-]
You can’t help the way you look but you can choose whether or not to go out of your way to deliberately draw attention to it.
mikestorrent 8 hours ago [-]
It's up to you to decide if someone setting the colour of a couple of pixels on the screen is "deliberately drawing attention" to it vs. just a cute customization that makes people feel included. Probably instead of picking a few tones we should just let people go full RGB on masked colours in the emoji so we can have green people too.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
It's racial caricaturization to emphasize and perpetuate racial divisions. Exact same as things like "Chinese eyes". It's not like rainbow flags at all, and almost absurd that this is considered dignified representations than straight up racism.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
> It's not like rainbow flags at all
It actually is. Sexual preferences also have no place in professional communication or really any non-intimate communication.
nomdep 6 hours ago [-]
Adding a skin color, let's say a thumbs-up with a black skin tone, its saying: "this is not just a thumbs-up, its different, it's a BLACK thumbs-up". See how racist it is?
Devorlon 3 hours ago [-]
Personally, no I don't see it.
b59831 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
chrismorgan 7 hours ago [-]
Another aspect is contrast. We put such a lot of effort into getting adequate contrast between background and foreground, and then emoji skin tones destroy it.
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
denkmoon 12 hours ago [-]
Just use yellow then? You don’t have to broadcast your skin ton, and for those that it matters to they can.
hdjrudni 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know how it is in Slack, but in other apps if someone already thumb'd something up you have the option of just clicking their thumb to +1 it or you can go into the emoji picker and pick your favorite shade of thumb. Sometimes you do just want to +1 so you just click whatever is already there and that's when this awkward dance begins.
adastra22 6 hours ago [-]
The awkwardness is only in your head.
Symbiote 4 hours ago [-]
Once I noticed all my non-white colleagues had selected the closest skin tone, I selected the white one.
If I click a black or brown thumbs up in Slack to add my own, a white one is added.
We're a very small team and three of the skin tone choices are unique, so I often know who has reacted from the colour.
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, that's totally not awkward. Imagine being the only one of a particular shade of human and constantly seeing your lonely thumbs up next to the the thumbs ups of the rest of the team.
stronglikedan 8 hours ago [-]
I just use the wrong emojis for my gender and skin tone. If anyone is truly offended by something as petty and insignificant as an emoji, it's like a scarlet letter warning me to not associate with them.
mock-possum 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah same I think it’s fun to just pick randomly between colour and gender every time
ascorbic 15 hours ago [-]
There are generic versions of all of them. All emojis have a base version without skin tone or gender applied. These are mostly displayed with yellow skin and a vaguely gender-neutral appearance. They're combined with modifiers to create the skin tone or gendered versions.
14 hours ago [-]
adastra22 6 hours ago [-]
How old are you? You don't have to answer of course, but I suspect this is either an age or a generational thing.
Being over 40, I just don't give a crap about those things.
deathanatos 4 hours ago [-]
Certainly the younger generations are not hung up on the skin tone of an emoji.
Some people customize them to more closely represent themselves. Some people use the defaults. Who … cares? … it's just an emoji.
Heck, for a while some emoji were only available in specific genders. (Those are much rarer, now.) Nobody where I work ever got hung up on the gender of an emoji not matching the user.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
> Heck, for a while some emoji were only available in specific genders. (Those are much rarer, now.) Nobody where I work ever got hung up on the gender of an emoji not matching the user.
You mean those emojis were originally gender neutral but have now been reinterpreted. Another unnecessary division that we really don't need.
adastra22 3 hours ago [-]
My experience is the opposite. I've seen 20-somethings getting hung up on these sorts of issues. My teen daughter is unhealthily concerned about such things. Us old farts dgaf.
nickdothutton 2 hours ago [-]
I see emojis as purely semiotic. I don't expect to find personalisation or see myself reflected in them at all. Perhaps this is because of my age and use of emoticons in the BBS days of the late 1980s. Perhaps it's also because when i press for one on a screen, I still conceptualise that action as pressing a mechanical/physical button, where no customisation would be possible.
freehorse 41 minutes ago [-]
This is why I hate this kind of stuff. Another reason that text-based emoticons like in the old times were far better. Why does anybody need to render ":(" into "U+1F641"? Nobody would ever think of debating race because of ":(". Unicode is not just technically confusing but spread sociopolitical confusion as well, like a contemporary babel tower. We could survive just fine in ASCII times, and on fewer bytes too, even if we had to be creative in how to represent languages with different alphabets.
bombcar 14 hours ago [-]
Wrong.
They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
And they should also support the gender combining code with any other emoji, in fact, any two emojis should be combinable (if you have the combination in your font, otherwise you just display both next to each other).
I'm only like 33% joking.
hdjrudni 6 hours ago [-]
> any two emojis should be combinable
That's literally what emoji kitchen is.
> They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
I've been using black thumbs up until now without realizing it's a racial thing... and I'm white.
are you telling me I've been offending people?
therealfiona 12 hours ago [-]
Depends where you work. Personally, I will think it is odd, then move on. But your HR department may have a different view.
If it is a personal slack, then have fun!
I'm a big fan of the rainbow thumbs up because I like rainbows.
umeshunni 12 hours ago [-]
luckily, it's not 2020 anymore, so you're unlikely to get canceled.
mock-possum 3 hours ago [-]
Har har har
John23832 10 hours ago [-]
Or people can be themselves and their skin tone?
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty much against avatars featuring people's actual faces too. Digital communication pretty much allows us to completely disregard another's appearance, so why reintroduce that via the backdoor?
Emoji segregation feels off and backwards.
hdjrudni 6 hours ago [-]
If someone uses my face as their avatar, yes.
If I use black skin tones as my default emoji set even though I'm white... I imagine others will find that weird at least.
deepsun 13 hours ago [-]
Why cannot we at least make that UI-configurable? Everyone would select what gender and skin tone they want to see in their UI. Same as code colors -- there's one code, but everyone is free to configure their text editors to colorize whatever they want.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
Skin tones for emojis shouldn't be a thing at all.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
paulryanrogers 13 hours ago [-]
Is it so bad to just click to increment the emoji regardless of the color/tone choice made by the first reaction?
I suppose if Slack were open to 3P clients you could override all the tone variants to use your choice. Maybe you can make a browser extension?
deathanatos 4 hours ago [-]
> Is it so bad to just click to increment the emoji regardless of the color/tone choice made by the first reaction?
This is sort of what I feel like the parent was implying without outright saying it, too. But: that's not how Slack works. If the only reaction is an emoji of skin tone A (let's say its a dark skin toned thumbs up), and I click that dark skin toned thumbs up to also react, Slack adds a thumbs up with the skin tone configured in the user's settings (which I believe defaults to no skin tone), not the skin tone of the initial reaction.
Settings → Messages & media → Default Skin Tone
petesergeant 8 hours ago [-]
iirc Slack will remember your chosen skin tone and will increment it based on that, rather than the first colour chosen
6 hours ago [-]
adamrezich 15 hours ago [-]
Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
paulryanrogers 13 hours ago [-]
> What did we gain from this?
The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.
And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion. The latter group has suffered centuries of oppression and exclusion, often based solely on their appearance, so it's an issue that impacts them differently.
Even "The Simpsons" has introduced characters with darker complexions alongside their yellow toned cast.
hdjrudni 6 hours ago [-]
If we're really set on this yellow=white argument, then just update all the emoji fonts/images to use some other color instead of introducing bajillions of new codepoints.
redviperpt 12 hours ago [-]
Guess we should have made them purple or green
paulryanrogers 12 hours ago [-]
Even if that worked, is it such a loss that we now have some personalization in our emojis? They aren't for super formal or technical needs. It's just something fun to express ourselves over text mediums.
Computers are powerful. We have no shortage of computer programmers. Given all the complexity in systems just to stay current and functional, a bit of extra work for emojis is a small price to pay.
Levitz 12 hours ago [-]
If the day comes in which Unicode is dropped as a standard I can guarantee you, this kind of bloat will be part of the reason
paulryanrogers 11 hours ago [-]
If so then it probably won't be dropped, but forked in a mostly backward compatible way. (At least up to the point that variants got out of hand.)
>The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.
>And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion.
They also represent those of thinner complexion. Overwhelmingly able-bodied too. Not to mention, it was always going to be the case since facial features are going to be dark tones and as such, it's clearer to represent them on a clear skin. This was always a nonsensical, losing game. Always has been.
I don't feel represented on the basis of branding personal expression with an identification of race as a default, the idea is frankly abhorrent to me. Why am I being excluded?
paulryanrogers 11 hours ago [-]
> I don't feel represented on the basis of branding personal expression with an identification of race as a default, the idea is frankly abhorrent to me. Why am I being excluded?
Is anyone forcing you to use a default? How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Maybe being disgusted by others choices for casual conversation is a personal matter. Something you could address with software to disregard whatever is so offensive, or a support group, or inward reflection.
aydyn 8 hours ago [-]
They should feel excluded if its a big deal to them.
WalterBright 12 hours ago [-]
> i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up
May I suggest "sounds good"?
I'm glad the D forums don't allow emojis.
hdjrudni 6 hours ago [-]
No. That creates a new message which might have been 10 messages ago. If you want to react to an older message without flooding the chatroom, emoji is the only way to do it.
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
I went through an emoji stage. Then realized I was wasting time looking for the perfect emoji and settling on an imperfect one. Then realized once again that a phonetic alphabet replaces all that nonsense.
jszymborski 10 hours ago [-]
I don't understand this kind of thinking at all.
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Very strange comment.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
> Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people.
No, it's incredibly racist and sexist to think those things are the most important distinctions of who you are.
philwelch 8 hours ago [-]
So you openly admit to treating people of different races differently. Interesting.
LorenDB 15 hours ago [-]
How about when a group chat has five different skin toned thumbs up reactions? So much for reaction based polls.
ascorbic 15 hours ago [-]
Slack groups the different variants, with counts for the total.
nsriv 15 hours ago [-]
I think most chat apps do the same, above commenter just needs to learn to count.
16 hours ago [-]
pyrolistical 15 hours ago [-]
Hmm. They should add indeterminate gender for all gendered emojis
U+1F937 - person shrugging
U+1F937 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F - man shrugging
U+1F937 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F - woman shrugging
throw0101d 16 hours ago [-]
Are there any more heart emojis? I'm not sure we have enough with Beating Heart, Broken Heart, Two Hearts, Sparkling Heart, Growing Heart, Heart with arrow, Blue Heart, Green Heart, Yellow Heart, Purple Heart, Heart with Ribbon, Revolving Hearts, Heart Decoration.
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
I'm not an American... but "bin fire" seems to be a thing too.
bell-cot 15 hours ago [-]
"Gun", "knife", and a fair number other emoji's are nerfed.
Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, because outlawing wrongspeak prevents people from communicating those concepts. People like you are giant eggplant emojis.
bell-cot 47 minutes ago [-]
Preventing people from "communicating those concepts" is your strawman, not the goal of the Unicode org. Regardless of whatever lip service they might give to "This little thing, plus Santa's naughty list, will magically make all the children nice" fantasies. They are a big org, doing normal big org things, and trying to dodge the Bad PR spotlight.
But glancing at your karma - are you contributing to a platform (HN) which outlaws wrongspeak, when you should start truly living your values?
Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.
anigbrowl 9 hours ago [-]
Ugh, I really don't care for their selection process. Emoji should be open source even though that means there will be nazi emoji and porn emoji, it should be up to the user which ones they use. The selection committee seems like a very arbitrary group and many of their decisions seem equally arbitrary.
rkomorn 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know if you've ever used even remotely popular slack instances, but I'd say the flood of new reactions people are constantly adding on the slack instances (including corporate ones) I've been on is not something I'd want to see repeated for emojis.
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
Useful feature though, but just for limited audiences (not just Slack of course, Mattermost does this too). We have a grammar Nazi flag, a rubber duck, and an animated dancing banana.
jamilton 7 hours ago [-]
At that point just have a messaging standard that allows in-line small images.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
It's only a matter of time until Unicode adopts embedded SVG.
lifthrasiir 8 hours ago [-]
This has been already brought up multiple times with multiple different proposals, all of which were unsatisfactory to this date.
bigstrat2003 16 hours ago [-]
They should all have been declined. Emojis are not text and have no place in a text encoding standard.
Spivak 15 hours ago [-]
:)
account42 2 hours ago [-]
The big difference between text emoticons and emojis is that emoticons are not defined by a committee.
bombcar 14 hours ago [-]
𓂺
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
Someone 16 hours ago [-]
https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html has a list of factors for inclusion (example: “is legible and visibly distinctive”) and a list of factors for exclusion (example: “is overly specific”)
...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.
This is all so archaic. Why are we sticking to a hard coded list? Instead, we just need emoji_start and emoji_end codepoints. The text between is rendered by AI into an emoji.
:homer_simpson_unsure_if_joking_or_not_meme:
account42 2 hours ago [-]
We don't even need the AI, the text could just get rendered in the mind of the receiving person.
People who are imaginatively challenged can use assistive technologies so they are not left behind of course.
leokennis 4 hours ago [-]
I shudder to be on the receiving end of these, using a phone with Apple "Intelligence" as its AI backend.
LeoPanthera 4 hours ago [-]
This is pretty much how Apple's genmojis work, but because they're platform specific, they get sent as png images.
stubish 3 hours ago [-]
I kind of like the randomness of platform specific. Never know if you are going to be squirting someone with a water pistol or blowing their brains out.
The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.
0xdada 3 minutes ago [-]
A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.
aendruk 15 hours ago [-]
It would help if UIs made it easy to see the name of each emoji. Sometimes I even know what semantics I want but can’t discern which image it’s been assigned to.
Someone 5 hours ago [-]
On MacOS and iOS/iPadOS, you can search for them by name.
Doesn’t help with “what are they trying to say?”, but does help with your “how do I say FOO?”
croisillon 2 hours ago [-]
when i enter "zen" i get the swearing emoji, not sure why but i love it
batiudrami 11 hours ago [-]
This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.
Yes, this is a really large problem that limits their usefulness as a means of communication. I limit myself to the most basic set (and use them sparingly) to avoid misunderstanding.
causal 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah I always hesitate to use emojis in any document or design for this reason, you have no idea how it's going to look to other viewers
djhn 15 hours ago [-]
Case in point: not all vendors implement flags!
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
Or leave out a handful of flags and render the rest. :)
I am saddened that in 2025 she still fails to render in a lot of contexts.
(ZWJ sequence combining Person in Steamy Room, Dark Skin Tone, Zero Width Joiner and Female Sign.)
a_shovel 16 hours ago [-]
Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.
wpm 8 hours ago [-]
I know that would as "loel" face
bsimpson 16 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of World of Goo.
I played it on Wii, but you can play it on your phone or computer too:
Me and my friends call him (the Open Eye Crying Laughing Face) Rolf. Would love it if Rolf made it into Unicode
Zee2 10 hours ago [-]
It’s always been Craugh for me.
runxel 12 hours ago [-]
Very interesting. I did the treasure chest emoji proposal back in 2018.
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
cedilla 11 hours ago [-]
If you had asked me yesterday, I would have bet money on a treasure chest already being an official emoji.
Rendello 2 hours ago [-]
There was a big "Mandela effect" meme where people were certain there'd been a robber emoji:
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.
lifthrasiir 8 hours ago [-]
It is so amazing that the CJK Unified Ideographs block is still being extended to this day, even though I do know many intricacies of encoding those characters, like Z-variants and normalization rules and such. How many of these characters are left for encoding? I genuinely have no idea!
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
It's probably academia catching up with historical documents digitised to Unicode. For CJKV any character can get added if it is found on an old scroll or something.
lifthrasiir 2 hours ago [-]
Of course, but I mean that there are only so many such historical documents in the world. So there is a limit that the CJK Unified Ideograph block can be extended. I'm surprised that the limit seems to be way higher than I initially thought.
gnulinux 12 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't understand why Unicode still doesn't have all subscript and superscript letters, which I personally need to use almost every day--and I imagine many people who write math/code as well--but has 8 different varieties of alien emoji to choose from. I still can't write something as trivially simple as $1_G$ which would mean the "1" of group "G" (which is like being unable to write the word "the" if math was a language) because unicode lacks subscript G (capital) but I can send my wife a slideshow made solely of emoji. It's unfortunate.
Indeed. Wouldn't the more universal solution to simply add a special unicode "prefix/suffix" combining code that would signal that the next symbol is sub/super? Than you wouldn't have to wait years for your favorite char to have an extra variatn while cursing at all the emoji proliferation?
arp242 11 hours ago [-]
The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
gnulinux 6 hours ago [-]
I don't want to debate, I just want to note that as a person who writes $1_G$ everyday, and also maintain Unicode char'd codebases (Agda) where have subscript G would be life saving: We understand that Unicode people think ^x _x is a formatting issue. It simply isn't any more than quotes, parenthesis, brackets are formatting. Subscript and superscript are their own thing regardless of formatting and they carry meaning and semantics. The simplest proof is $^{-1}$ which means "inverse" and has nothing to do with minus or 1 symbol, it's not a formatting thereof, it simply means "inverse", the same way recycle emoji mean "recycle".
nabla9 10 hours ago [-]
Emojis are also formatting issue. Smileys: :) ;) :o
I don't understand why we need to add small images into character set. Hieroglyphs for those who can't read?
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
Because language is use. Billions of people use emoji in their every day textual communications. Unicode exists to encode all textual communication.
nabla9 1 hours ago [-]
Emoji symbols don't emerge from language use.
Corporations like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook invent them. And pay tens of thousands a year for Unicode consortium so that they can vote to add them to the standard.
They are corporate symbols.
Freak_NL 17 minutes ago [-]
Emoji were in widespread use in Japan on the mobile phones of the generation before the smartphone. That is a corpus of many years of human communication which falls within the goals of Unicode to unlock. Those emoji may have been invented by AU, Softbank, and NTTDocomo, but they exist.
The recent additions come from a variety of proposals; most seem to be independent initiatives.
Big tech embraced emoji, but they got in the standard without them. Their widespread use was pretty much a given.
10 hours ago [-]
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
But the currently encoded sub/supersripts counter that general view?
> agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want
So? Should we stop adding emojis just because the potential is infinite?
> And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic?
Add a combining prefix/suffix and you wouldn't need to do encode every single char from those alphabets. But also the general answer exists: whatever is commonly useful.
stanac 11 hours ago [-]
Coming spring 2026. I feel lucky, I don't have wait a full year for new emojis like Australians.
elitistphoenix 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Companies need to learn there are two hemispheres.
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
Well, twice as many 'hemispheres' are there are great ellipses (itself a word with two meanings).
Which is a pointless nitpick given those two cardinalities are the same.
unglaublich 3 hours ago [-]
I feel bad for the poor unicode implementers these days, what a metric ton of work. How would folks go about partial implementations? Or using fallback fonts for missing points?
masklinn 3 hours ago [-]
Unicode implementation was always a ton of work. Far as I can tell there have been few novel features beyond ZWJ sequences maybe? I don’t know if these are treated separately or as ligatures by engines.
The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.
I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.
bogdart 13 hours ago [-]
They need to stop. The list is becoming ridiculously long.
Rendello 1 hours ago [-]
Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
km3r 9 hours ago [-]
Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).
Alifatisk 1 hours ago [-]
Still hoping for flag of Kurdistan to be included
chamomeal 11 hours ago [-]
So when Unicode releases a bunch of emojis, is it kinda like releasing a spec? Like Apple/android then has to have their designers go and actually draw all of the emojis from the spec?
cedilla 11 hours ago [-]
In principle yes, but of course they don't have to. It's their own choice to have bespoke drawings. They also could just refuse to add the new emoji and just show �.
int_19h 9 hours ago [-]
Additionally, quite a few popular apps package their own emoji, at least in part. IIRC Firefox does this on Windows.
mixmix 3 hours ago [-]
Never thought I'd say it but I really miss UCS-2.
gertrunde 1 hours ago [-]
Probably the one thing I find most frustrating about these current unicode emojis is that they have been extended/evolved so far now that they fail to fulfil their original purpose.
Original purpose: simple/clear way to convey an emotional context to text
Current result: "What the heck is does face even mean?" or "Let's use these symbols as the basic for unintelligible slang."
(Bonus extra issue: Different implementations with subtly different images that imply a slightly different emotional context)
More often than not, I tend to default to basic old text emoticons, as it more clearly expresses the intent.
anikom15 15 hours ago [-]
I would be more receptive to endless emojis if Unicode bothered to accept archaic and historical forms of characters as well as deprecating Han unification. It’s rather odd that they reject actual useful things while accepting endless objects that have never been found in any text prior.
rmunn 12 hours ago [-]
I know several linguists who also know more than a little about computers. The number of times I've heard rants about the Unicode committee rejecting a perfectly valid historical character, yet adding more "modern hieroglyphics" (emojis)... well, let's just say that it's happened more than once.
lifthrasiir 8 hours ago [-]
Eh, Han unification was an one-off decision. Now many (but not all) characters have been disunified as needed, like the infamous Biang character [1] which received two different code points. Of course common characters are much less likely to be disunified, because at this point many decades have been passed after the initial encoding and any disunification would cause compatibility issues.
It's an upheld decision. The unification is not about reducing character counts overall, but to co-mingle CJKV languages. Adding more characters is not un-mingling existing characters.
One thing I feared might happen and do seem to be happening is, Chinese LLMs and AI projects seem to be moving towards Chinese-English bilingual models away from regular omni-lingual models, which, I think is, because LLMs would become confused with Chinese-invalid syntaxes and dictionary definitions, and/or generally perform worse, if substantial non-Chinese CJKV data was included in the dataset.
At the polar opposite of computing, Hollow Knight: Sliksong released just days prior is having Han Unification font problem as well: as you might know, thanks to Han Unification, CJKV languages each require its own font, of which no two cannot be active at the same time, and characters become mangled if application developer spends substantial cost implementing such non-standard feature. The developers was not aware of that, and did not spend extra cost doing so, and is getting review bombed in China.
It just needs to be reversed. It's a real problem. Adding more obscure characters and obscure features is tangential and not a solution. Different isolated clusters of characters uses need to be separated, not overlapped into one same area, like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary".
lifthrasiir 5 hours ago [-]
The unification, implemented in Unicode 1.1, is definitely a character count reduction mechanism. I'm very sure that if the decision to abandon 16-bit character set was done earlier then the unification wouldn't have happened.
And I'm saying this as a CJKV person and past gamedev: CJKV languages each require its own font no matter whether the Han unification is implemented or not. There are simply too many glyphs there; not just unified characters, but also common characters that are not considered unified are also often varying across countries. If you account for all those glyph variations in a single font, you just can't cope up because OpenType only supports at most 65,536 glyphs in a single typeface. In the alternative universe OpenType may have been extended to allow more glyphs in a single typeface, I don't know, but CJKV characters are simply complex enough to require multiple font files in general. Han unification is of less concern when you have too many glyphs.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
> not just unified characters, but also common characters that are not considered unified are also often varying across countries.
That's the unification, the issues stemming from CJKVs each not having own code points. The issue is not that CJKVs need multiple font files and it's cumbersome, the issue is that no two CJKV fonts may be loaded at the same time because there are conflicting glyphs. Conflicting glyphs. That's just wrong.
lifthrasiir 2 hours ago [-]
If you somehow want to display, say, both Japanese and Chinese texts at the same time, there is no technical obstacle that prevents you to do so. Pan-Unicode fonts come with differently named files for CJKV characters so that is not even difficult. Yes, your assets will have multiple multi-megabyte font files. Is that a problem for modern games? I don't think so.
There is a single circumstance where this is not generally doable: a user name in globally serviced online games. (Guess why I know of this case...) Unless there is a hint that a particular user prefers one's user name to be displayed in a certain way, it is difficult to decide which font to use (or even which set of fonts to use). But it's a very niche problem and otherwise you know which language of the text you are showing and can pick the correct font from your assets.
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
> like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary"
But there is a single Latin alphabet
numpad0 1 hours ago [-]
Except there are standalone Greek/Coptic as well as Cyrillic ranges in Unicode. Latin A, Greek A, and Russian A each has its own versions in Unicode, so that Latin or Russian fonts don't have to be deleted from apps and operating systems configured for Greek usage to show Greek :alpha: consistent with Greek :phi: without getting it substituted by lowercase Latin `a`.
eviks 51 minutes ago [-]
> standalone Greek/Coptic
So? Unicode isn't in either of the extremes, so it didn't unify Latin and Greek (using language tags to differentiate), but then it also didn't separate German and French, so your GermanFrench dictionary still falls flat, it's doesn't help in picking the dividing line
account42 1 hours ago [-]
Unifying I and I was also a mistake although that one at least preceded Unicode.
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
> thousands of new characters, new scripts, new symbols, and of course… new emoji.
Just pointless madness.
13 hours ago [-]
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
So is there any way to update your installed emoji on windows? I'm stuck on 12.0
15 hours ago [-]
keybored 12 hours ago [-]
Unicode with an emphasis on emoji is HN ragebait. Out of all the things, people get really upset that U+1F9B0 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR is taking up codepoint space.
_ZeD_ 5 hours ago [-]
what unicode miss is mimosa's branches and italian cards (I really want to send a three of clubs or a seven of coins to some of my friends)
jack21099 2 hours ago [-]
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard.
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
Please stop. We have too many already. I cannot keep up with all the double and tripple meanings. I do not dare use an emofji for fear of unintended meaning.
Just leave it alone for a few years.
mmastrac 16 hours ago [-]
I'm excited to see the Seahorse emoji.
globular-toast 3 hours ago [-]
Oh great, more stickers for children.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
Still bitter we never got the chainsaw emoji a few years back.
runarberg 11 hours ago [-]
So we have a treasure chest but still no lighthouse.
mns 2 hours ago [-]
Or a submarine :(
16 hours ago [-]
madamelic 16 hours ago [-]
I love using emojis but can't stand what it has turned into.
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
eviks 8 hours ago [-]
2000 vs 4000 makes no difference for the UI of a picker, and you can have your recently used/favorites with your 200 in the picker to avoid the long scroll
miloignis 16 hours ago [-]
This feels more like a proposal for whatever emoji-picker you're using than for Unicode - I don't use most of the scripts defined by Unicode, and I don't use most of the emoji either. No one is forcing me to use every Unicode codepoint.
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
shafoshaf 16 hours ago [-]
I basically still only use :), :(, and :P. I also have to "undo" it when they switch my chars to an actual emoji. The only one I wish were easier to show is ¯\\(ツ)/¯
ctippett 13 hours ago [-]
Apple's text replacement feature is perfect for this. I have a bunch of ascii emojis that auto-complete for me when I type a matching string (I've based mine on the old BB Code emoticon syntax[1]), e.g. :shrug: → ¯\\(ツ)/¯ (as it happens I also have a text replacement that converts -> into an arrow).
> Every year, if an emoji is not used enough, it's deleted.
This would be like deleting kanji, and would also require perfect surveillance of everyone's devices.
If you want Chat Control you don't have to hide behind weird recommendations about emoji
madamelic 16 hours ago [-]
The proposal was tongue-in-cheek but the sentiment remains. There are way too many emojis and we should figure out a way to cull the herd.
mmastrac 16 hours ago [-]
You could easily do a zero-knowledge proof thing where you transmit a bitmask of emoji used over the next 365 days, with N bits randomly permuted. In aggregate, you'd still be able to count usage without saying definitively someone used or didn't use a particular emoji.
bsimpson 16 hours ago [-]
Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
LOL those evil Standards Body thugs, waiting in the shadows for you to open up a keyboard so they can jump out and force your fingers to type in specific emojis that you don't like! How dare they?
Sparkle-san 14 hours ago [-]
It this the real bigfoot conspiracy theory?
bombcar 14 hours ago [-]
real racists love those 'mojis, now you can be horribly racist just in a few characters!
bbor 16 hours ago [-]
As much as I want HN to finally support markdown, I really want them to end the baffling anti-emoji stance. They’re adorable, versatile, fun, and useful - the only reason to ban them from forum comments is banal distaste for the new.
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
pcthrowaway 16 hours ago [-]
As a rock climber I anticipate wanting to use the rockfall emoji (not landslide) much more frequently than the sasquatch, though it depends how wild my climbing adventures get
dfee 5 hours ago [-]
I’d imagine - depending on your location - you might need to quickly text out a Sasquatch emoji from a perch on a climb.
I’ve done a bit of climbing, and I guess I’m just struggling to imagine using it… rocks falling is either not a big enough deal to text about (cause we’re all following safety guidelines by wearing helmets, right?), or way too big of a deal to make light of with an emoji. The latter case applies even more so in cases where the rocks hit buildings.
The only situations I can imagine are a) “im gonna be late, the road is blocked by rockfall” and b) “couldn’t go skiing this weekend, an avalanche closed the slope”. But maybe two is enough! And who knows, maybe it’ll be interpreted as “collapse” in general, which is broadly useful obviously.
pcthrowaway 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nulld3v 16 hours ago [-]
Feels like there is something missing every time I use a forum that doesn't support phpBB smilies.
I’ve been around the internet for a long and a lot of time and have never seen s2 being used to convey a heart… took me second to figure it out actually.
lifthrasiir 8 hours ago [-]
I think HN should allow emojis but strip all colors out of them. Colors are what often makes emojis so annoying---without them they are just another characters.
16 hours ago [-]
arduanika 7 hours ago [-]
Eh, it's just one of the ways that HN tries to keep it pg.
OutOfHere 16 hours ago [-]
It is sad to see the limited Unicode character space go to waste with these silly additions. The unallocated space should be reserved for future civilizations, AI intercommunication languages that are yet to come, extraterrestrial languages that will emerge, etc. Filling up the space with garbage dooms it.
layer8 13 hours ago [-]
At the rate at which new emojis are being added, the currently unallocated space would be exhausted in around 4000 years. However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.
account42 1 hours ago [-]
> However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.
Can we do that now please to finally kill UTF-16.
iamtedd 16 hours ago [-]
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard that is more or less agnostic to each language (is universally painful to work with), and yet they talk about the rollout in terms that only make sense to the northern hemisphere (seasons).
chucksmash 16 hours ago [-]
U+1F921
bbor 16 hours ago [-]
I mean this is just some blog, no? I guess quarters are technically a bit more inclusive, but it seems like small beans IMHO — the 12% of humanity living south of the equator is likely used to this sorta thing.
Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
iamtedd 16 hours ago [-]
I missed that it's a "personal" blog, but they prominently describe their position as the emoji subcommittee chair, so it's more or less an official outlet.
Northern bias, yes. What about emoji or Unicode is tied to the weather? Why not use more universal time markers? If dates or months are truly too precise for this timeline, quarters are good enough. They could also just have a month range or "approx".
Being near the equator (whether northern side or southern), I don't have an innate sense of seasons at all, so have to remember what people are referring to when they use these terms.
mikepurvis 16 hours ago [-]
I like how SkillUp handles it in the This Week In Videogames show when talking about release days; basically says "northern summer" which acknowledges that the publisher said summer while clarifying whose summer it actually is (eg, not his, since he's Australia-based).
aydyn 8 hours ago [-]
Unicode has gone too far.
A handful of emojis, fine. Pictures are not language.
We don't need a bunch of new pictures to "support the world's writing systems" (their own words).
kanbara 4 hours ago [-]
in fact, many proto languages were glyph based. human language and pictographs are intertwined— just look at how people use smileys, emoji, kaomoji, and more.
aydyn 2 hours ago [-]
Then include those languages. Emojis are not part of any language.
brodo 5 hours ago [-]
I‘m still a little mad about the fact that there are three alcoholic drink emoji but none for anything hemp-related. There where proposals for including them, but they where rejected. Another case of American puritanism determining online culture.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
I thought the skin color thing is silly until I saw this vine. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g
Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.
I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis.
As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.
Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.
This feels more like virtue signaling than any kind of reason: This kind of logic lets you forever find new kinds of racism that you can then make performative fights against so that you can ignore real issues that plague the world.
Take these images, how recognisable would any of the characters (those with hair) be with different hair?
https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/35476104/296227...
https://75609.cdn.simplo7.net/static/75609/sku/funko-pop-fun...
Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.
> When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity
Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”.
Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.
Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.
Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later.
The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando.
They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it.
As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’.
My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.
I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy.
I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives.
Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably.
That is a misreading of what I said.
The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case.
So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc.
Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy?
Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
Are you talking about “Western culture”, or “progressive-leaning US(-centric) culture”? Because the idea that a colour choice made in Japan has some kind of racial meaning is much more strongly associated with the second than the first.
When people talk about the history of emojis, they're giving evidence that yellow isn't white. They're not accusing you of saying anything about history.
You dont need to do that.
BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.
And not because they intentionally made yellow into white, but because they unintentionally made it so.
It's exactly the same as being an american vs being an african-american. You don't call white americans european-americans. Society (or media) assigned a racial default.
I'm gonna be a little more forward with this last argument: This is the product of mixed societies that have not dealt with racial bias and/or the consequences of racism well.
The fact is that there already exists a racial default, I didn't make it, it simply exists due to the nuances of our society, its history and/or its media.
I didn't invent either term and I am not THE dictionary.
This is how these terms are interpreted by the world and also through simple logic. I am not the one who interprets these terms and their usage.
American society and culture is still severely segregated due to how crappily it dealt with the consequences of its racist history.
White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
We're not talking about pure logic of meaning, we're talking about social usage of terms.
Because in the current ((zeitgeist)) Europeans are not allowed to have a racial identity.
When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?
When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda.
The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version.
And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
And really, when you're talking about perceived racial overtones of emojis, "in their perception" is what matters, isn't it? There's no objective, 2+2=4 truth that we can point to in this particular argument, as there is in some arguments, because it's all about what subtext different people are reading into things. The objective truth is that those pixels are a certain color; the perception of them is subjective, varying from person to person.
And while some people prefer to use emojis that reflect their skin tone (whether it's lighter or darker), others prefer to use the yellow emojis instead of the ones that would better reflect their skin tone. The fact that they chose that color when they had other options available suggests strongly that they are trying to communicate a "skin tone doesn't matter in the context of this communication" message.
You are arguing that the yellow color isn't inherently neutral, but I claim that you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Even if the yellow color isn't inherently as neutral as it was intended to be, the fact that people are choosing it over colors that would more accurately reflect their skin tone means that it is neutral enough for the purpose.
A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
> The yellow emoji is not perceived as neutral by either Black or White readers. On average, both groups perceive it as more likely to index a White identity, and we find this effect to be stronger among White readers.
I think you're onto something.
Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.
You're also continuously broadcasting your skintone and gender in the office simply by existing. Is that inappropriate and unprofessional too?
It actually is. Sexual preferences also have no place in professional communication or really any non-intimate communication.
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
If I click a black or brown thumbs up in Slack to add my own, a white one is added.
We're a very small team and three of the skin tone choices are unique, so I often know who has reacted from the colour.
Being over 40, I just don't give a crap about those things.
Some people customize them to more closely represent themselves. Some people use the defaults. Who … cares? … it's just an emoji.
Heck, for a while some emoji were only available in specific genders. (Those are much rarer, now.) Nobody where I work ever got hung up on the gender of an emoji not matching the user.
You mean those emojis were originally gender neutral but have now been reinterpreted. Another unnecessary division that we really don't need.
They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
And they should also support the gender combining code with any other emoji, in fact, any two emojis should be combinable (if you have the combination in your font, otherwise you just display both next to each other).
I'm only like 33% joking.
That's literally what emoji kitchen is.
> They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
Why stop there... we have 10-bit color and beyond now. Give me display-p3 (https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...)
are you telling me I've been offending people?
If it is a personal slack, then have fun!
I'm a big fan of the rainbow thumbs up because I like rainbows.
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
Emoji segregation feels off and backwards.
If I use black skin tones as my default emoji set even though I'm white... I imagine others will find that weird at least.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
I suppose if Slack were open to 3P clients you could override all the tone variants to use your choice. Maybe you can make a browser extension?
This is sort of what I feel like the parent was implying without outright saying it, too. But: that's not how Slack works. If the only reaction is an emoji of skin tone A (let's say its a dark skin toned thumbs up), and I click that dark skin toned thumbs up to also react, Slack adds a thumbs up with the skin tone configured in the user's settings (which I believe defaults to no skin tone), not the skin tone of the initial reaction.
Settings → Messages & media → Default Skin Tone
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.
And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion. The latter group has suffered centuries of oppression and exclusion, often based solely on their appearance, so it's an issue that impacts them differently.
Even "The Simpsons" has introduced characters with darker complexions alongside their yellow toned cast.
Computers are powerful. We have no shortage of computer programmers. Given all the complexity in systems just to stay current and functional, a bit of extra work for emojis is a small price to pay.
https://cultofthepartyparrot.com/
>And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion.
They also represent those of thinner complexion. Overwhelmingly able-bodied too. Not to mention, it was always going to be the case since facial features are going to be dark tones and as such, it's clearer to represent them on a clear skin. This was always a nonsensical, losing game. Always has been.
I don't feel represented on the basis of branding personal expression with an identification of race as a default, the idea is frankly abhorrent to me. Why am I being excluded?
Is anyone forcing you to use a default? How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Maybe being disgusted by others choices for casual conversation is a personal matter. Something you could address with software to disregard whatever is so offensive, or a support group, or inward reflection.
May I suggest "sounds good"?
I'm glad the D forums don't allow emojis.
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Very strange comment.
No, it's incredibly racist and sexist to think those things are the most important distinctions of who you are.
https://emojipedia.org/neutral
* https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+1F300
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.
https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire
Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.
But glancing at your karma - are you contributing to a platform (HN) which outlaws wrongspeak, when you should start truly living your values?
Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
I don’t think Unicode.org has a nice list of rejected proposals, but examples are easily googled, for example https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-propos...
I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394
...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters
:homer_simpson_unsure_if_joking_or_not_meme:
People who are imaginatively challenged can use assistive technologies so they are not left behind of course.
I kind of love this idea...
Doesn’t help with “what are they trying to say?”, but does help with your “how do I say FOO?”
Or the eye roll one: https://imgur.com/FE664R2
Good times
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166519
I am saddened that in 2025 she still fails to render in a lot of contexts.
(ZWJ sequence combining Person in Steamy Room, Dark Skin Tone, Zero Width Joiner and Female Sign.)
I played it on Wii, but you can play it on your phone or computer too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/22000/World_of_Goo/
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
https://emojipedia.org/robber-emoji-mandela-effect
* https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45187274
There are some charts with the new characters available at:
* https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
I don't understand why we need to add small images into character set. Hieroglyphs for those who can't read?
Corporations like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook invent them. And pay tens of thousands a year for Unicode consortium so that they can vote to add them to the standard.
They are corporate symbols.
The recent additions come from a variety of proposals; most seem to be independent initiatives.
Big tech embraced emoji, but they got in the standard without them. Their widespread use was pretty much a given.
> agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want
So? Should we stop adding emojis just because the potential is infinite?
> And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic?
Add a combining prefix/suffix and you wouldn't need to do encode every single char from those alphabets. But also the general answer exists: whatever is commonly useful.
Which is a pointless nitpick given those two cardinalities are the same.
The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.
I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
Original purpose: simple/clear way to convey an emotional context to text
Current result: "What the heck is does face even mean?" or "Let's use these symbols as the basic for unintelligible slang."
(Bonus extra issue: Different implementations with subtly different images that imply a slightly different emotional context)
More often than not, I tend to default to basic old text emoticons, as it more clearly expresses the intent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode
One thing I feared might happen and do seem to be happening is, Chinese LLMs and AI projects seem to be moving towards Chinese-English bilingual models away from regular omni-lingual models, which, I think is, because LLMs would become confused with Chinese-invalid syntaxes and dictionary definitions, and/or generally perform worse, if substantial non-Chinese CJKV data was included in the dataset.
At the polar opposite of computing, Hollow Knight: Sliksong released just days prior is having Han Unification font problem as well: as you might know, thanks to Han Unification, CJKV languages each require its own font, of which no two cannot be active at the same time, and characters become mangled if application developer spends substantial cost implementing such non-standard feature. The developers was not aware of that, and did not spend extra cost doing so, and is getting review bombed in China.
It just needs to be reversed. It's a real problem. Adding more obscure characters and obscure features is tangential and not a solution. Different isolated clusters of characters uses need to be separated, not overlapped into one same area, like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary".
And I'm saying this as a CJKV person and past gamedev: CJKV languages each require its own font no matter whether the Han unification is implemented or not. There are simply too many glyphs there; not just unified characters, but also common characters that are not considered unified are also often varying across countries. If you account for all those glyph variations in a single font, you just can't cope up because OpenType only supports at most 65,536 glyphs in a single typeface. In the alternative universe OpenType may have been extended to allow more glyphs in a single typeface, I don't know, but CJKV characters are simply complex enough to require multiple font files in general. Han unification is of less concern when you have too many glyphs.
That's the unification, the issues stemming from CJKVs each not having own code points. The issue is not that CJKVs need multiple font files and it's cumbersome, the issue is that no two CJKV fonts may be loaded at the same time because there are conflicting glyphs. Conflicting glyphs. That's just wrong.
There is a single circumstance where this is not generally doable: a user name in globally serviced online games. (Guess why I know of this case...) Unless there is a hint that a particular user prefers one's user name to be displayed in a certain way, it is difficult to decide which font to use (or even which set of fonts to use). But it's a very niche problem and otherwise you know which language of the text you are showing and can pick the correct font from your assets.
But there is a single Latin alphabet
So? Unicode isn't in either of the extremes, so it didn't unify Latin and Greek (using language tags to differentiate), but then it also didn't separate German and French, so your GermanFrench dictionary still falls flat, it's doesn't help in picking the dividing line
Just pointless madness.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
https://emojipedia.org/guard
The soldiers in my country don't wear camo uniforms, and even to us it would be clear.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
[1] https://tl.net/forum/smilies.php
This would be like deleting kanji, and would also require perfect surveillance of everyone's devices.
If you want Chat Control you don't have to hide behind weird recommendations about emoji
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
https://www.orcas.pt/
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
After all, Sasquatch live near many rock climbing destinations. https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp
I’ve done a bit of climbing, and I guess I’m just struggling to imagine using it… rocks falling is either not a big enough deal to text about (cause we’re all following safety guidelines by wearing helmets, right?), or way too big of a deal to make light of with an emoji. The latter case applies even more so in cases where the rocks hit buildings.
The only situations I can imagine are a) “im gonna be late, the road is blocked by rockfall” and b) “couldn’t go skiing this weekend, an avalanche closed the slope”. But maybe two is enough! And who knows, maybe it’ll be interpreted as “collapse” in general, which is broadly useful obviously.
Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:
Can we do that now please to finally kill UTF-16.
Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
Northern bias, yes. What about emoji or Unicode is tied to the weather? Why not use more universal time markers? If dates or months are truly too precise for this timeline, quarters are good enough. They could also just have a month range or "approx".
Being near the equator (whether northern side or southern), I don't have an innate sense of seasons at all, so have to remember what people are referring to when they use these terms.
A handful of emojis, fine. Pictures are not language.
We don't need a bunch of new pictures to "support the world's writing systems" (their own words).