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.)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
I remember ICQ and early forum software with yellow smiles (emoji was not a word yet). First NTT eonji set is 1999 according to Wikipedia, and ICQ is 1996-1998 (I'm not sure, that first version contains graphical smiles, but 1998 one for sure had ones).
Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
> 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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like my (sub)language is being designed by committee. Ridiculous!
Show me a chat client/platform that can do inline SVG emojis and allow people to spread them using copy+paste and build emoji libraries, and I'll switch instantly.
While I understand that people like a base vocabulary of the common elements defined in a list, it has always seemed like a mistake that we keep adding to some massive list for every fringe demand, instead of just embedding tiny SVGs that can be perfectly aligned to every single platform, niche, industry, and so on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
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).
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).
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?
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.
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?
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 �.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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`.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)/¯
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Because he wouldn't be recognizable? It would be like making Yoda pink or R2D2 black.
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.
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?
https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/35476104/296227...
https://75609.cdn.simplo7.net/static/75609/sku/funko-pop-fun...
> Because he wouldn't be recognizable?
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://hallofbricks.shop/cdn/shop/files/lego_starwars_minif... (original)
https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
Looks fine to me?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
I'm pretty sure the yellow colour for emoji was chosen by NTT in Japan
I remember ICQ and early forum software with yellow smiles (emoji was not a word yet). First NTT eonji set is 1999 according to Wikipedia, and ICQ is 1996-1998 (I'm not sure, that first version contains graphical smiles, but 1998 one for sure had ones).
Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
Is it specified that semantically neutral appear yellow or is the color free to vary by implementation/user preference?
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).
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's actually quite simple: warriors are useless outside a war so they tend to go looking for one.
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.
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.
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”
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Emojis are about ideas. Believing that a skin color can tell everything there is about you (and thus "identifying" with one) is incredibly racist.
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.
Pretending that emoticons are a Japanese invention is also a weird kind of historical revisionism.
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.
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.)
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.
If you interpret the term “American” to only refer to white people, maybe you’re the one with racial problems.
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.
> 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.
"European" is a racial identity more in the americas than in europe.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
> 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.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there has actually been academic research done on the topic: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/244936525/Bl...
> 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 wonder if this could be solved by just making the default emoji green or blue or something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I don't have to type my race when I write an email.
You don't make a statement that your skin tone is relevant simply by existing.
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.
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.
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?
Personally, no I don't see it.
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.
> 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.
Just use yellow then? You don’t have to broadcast your skin ton, and for those that it matters to they can.
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.
The awkwardness is only in your head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah same I think it’s fun to just pick randomly between colour and gender every time
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
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?
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.
luckily, it's not 2020 anymore, so you're unlikely to get canceled.
Har har har
Or people can be themselves and their skin tone?
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
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.
> Emoji segregation feels off and backwards.
Please explain in what way does segregation have anything to do with emojis?
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.
> 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.
Then don’t? Why create some weird hypothetical? Just let people be who they are.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Guess we should have made them purple or green
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.
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
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.)
..or parrots.
https://cultofthepartyparrot.com/
>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?
> 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.
They should feel excluded if its a big deal to them.
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?
> 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
iirc Slack will remember your chosen skin tone and will increment it based on that, rather than the first colour chosen
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
So you openly admit to treating people of different races differently. Interesting.
How about when a group chat has five different skin toned thumbs up reactions? So much for reaction based polls.
Slack groups the different variants, with counts for the total.
I think most chat apps do the same, above commenter just needs to learn to count.
Hmm. They should add indeterminate gender for all gendered emojis
That's already a thing!
https://emojipedia.org/neutral
What's the deal with 'Man in Turban'?
What's wrong with it?
It’s just a British man, what is wrong with it?
The base yellow one?
U+1F937 - person shrugging U+1F937 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F - man shrugging U+1F937 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F - woman shrugging
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.
* 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 process is described here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#process
The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.
kinda mad guillotine got rejected, it concisely expresses a very popular sentiment
oh that was me who wrote the proposal for it.
https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji
I'm more disappointed that "Dumpster Fire" hasn't made the grade four times.
Would controversial emojis even get widespread support? Look at what happened to gun emoji.
Which is really the root problem with emojis: they're a top down definition of what concepts you are allowed to communicate.
If you're only allowed to communicate in emojis, I guess? Other than that I'm not sure what bearing emojis have on what I'm allowed to talk about.
"Dumpster fire" is a idiomatic phrase in English/US, so may not be universal enough.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire
I'm not an American... but "bin fire" seems to be a thing too.
"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.
Ah yes, because outlawing wrongspeak prevents people from communicating those concepts. People like you are giant eggplant emojis.
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?
In the spirit of the discussion I'll respond in image form: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...
Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.
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.
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.
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.
I like it! And I've been guilty of adding my own.
But yes, limited audiences. Exactly that.
At that point just have a messaging standard that allows in-line small images.
It's only a matter of time until Unicode adopts embedded SVG.
This has been already brought up multiple times with multiple different proposals, all of which were unsatisfactory to this date.
They should all have been declined. Emojis are not text and have no place in a text encoding standard.
:)
The big difference between text emoticons and emojis is that emoticons are not defined by a committee.
𓂺
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
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”)
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...
Unicode's list of emoji proposal status: https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
>Are there any more heart emojis?
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
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:
Yes! (minus the AI part)
I feel like my (sub)language is being designed by committee. Ridiculous!
Show me a chat client/platform that can do inline SVG emojis and allow people to spread them using copy+paste and build emoji libraries, and I'll switch instantly.
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.
I shudder to be on the receiving end of these, using a phone with Apple "Intelligence" as its AI backend.
While I understand that people like a base vocabulary of the common elements defined in a list, it has always seemed like a mistake that we keep adding to some massive list for every fringe demand, instead of just embedding tiny SVGs that can be perfectly aligned to every single platform, niche, industry, and so on.
This is pretty much how Apple's genmojis work, but because they're platform specific, they get sent as png images.
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.
Genius indistinguishable from madness.
https://imgur.com/a/qA5aYso
I kind of love this idea...
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.
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.
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?”
when i enter "zen" i get the swearing emoji, not sure why but i love it
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.
This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.
I really miss that old Samsung grimace emoji: https://imgur.com/02C8x4i
Or the eye roll one: https://imgur.com/FE664R2
Good times
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.
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
Case in point: not all vendors implement flags!
Or leave out a handful of flags and render the rest. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166519
Imagine if Apple or Google decided to just not render certain words or replace them with a different one. Somehow this is acceptable with emojis.
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.
I know that would as "loel" face
Reminds me of World of Goo.
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/
Me and my friends call him (the Open Eye Crying Laughing Face) Rolf. Would love it if Rolf made it into Unicode
It’s always been Craugh for me.
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!
If you had asked me yesterday, I would have bet money on a treasure chest already being an official emoji.
There was a big "Mandela effect" meme where people were certain there'd been a robber emoji:
https://emojipedia.org/robber-emoji-mandela-effect
For Unicode 17 more generally:
* 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.
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!
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.
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.
Coming spring 2026. I feel lucky, I don't have wait a full year for new emojis like Australians.
Agreed. Companies need to learn there are two hemispheres.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
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?
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?
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".
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?
Because language is use. Billions of people use emoji in their every day textual communications. Unicode exists to encode all textual communication.
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.
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.
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.
In 2017, I adopted a black woman in a steamy room emoji. (at https://aac.unicode.org/sponsors )
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.)
Can you link to somewhere that can render it? I cannot imagine what this emoji would be.
https://emojipedia.org/woman-in-steamy-room-dark-skin-tone
edit: and now I see Slack can finally render her correctly - :woman_in_steamy_room::skin-tone-6:
I take it all back then. Slack can do it correctly now
They need to stop. The list is becoming ridiculously long.
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
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).
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).
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?
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.
> thousands of new characters, new scripts, new symbols, and of course… new emoji.
Just pointless madness.
They need to release an Epstein Files emoji!
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?
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 �.
Additionally, quite a few popular apps package their own emoji, at least in part. IIRC Firefox does this on Windows.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
> like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary"
But there is a single Latin alphabet
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`.
> 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
Unifying I and I was also a mistake although that one at least preceded Unicode.
Never thought I'd say it but I really miss UCS-2.
Still hoping for flag of Kurdistan to be included
So is there any way to update your installed emoji on windows? I'm stuck on 12.0
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.
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.
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)
I'm excited to see the Seahorse emoji.
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.
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard.
Oh great, more stickers for children.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
I just want sitelen pona in Unicode already >:(
https://sites.google.com/view/sitelenemoji
Why no soldier profession emoji?
There are British soldiers.
https://emojipedia.org/guard
What country's uniform would they wear?
Generic camo.
The soldiers in my country don't wear camo uniforms, and even to us it would be clear.
Which brand of a gun should be used?
Which of inch or metric is more appropriate?
in which emoji?
Still no fig hand gesture emoji? Come on.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
Still bitter we never got the chainsaw emoji a few years back.
So we have a treasure chest but still no lighthouse.
Or a submarine :(
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.
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.
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
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)/¯
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).
[1] https://tl.net/forum/smilies.php
shrugs and walks off
> 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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.orcas.pt/
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.
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
I’d imagine - depending on your location - you might need to quickly text out a Sasquatch emoji from a perch on a climb.
After all, Sasquatch live near many rock climbing destinations. https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp
In glad someone is excited for it!
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.
Feels like there is something missing every time I use a forum that doesn't support phpBB smilies.
Here are some ascii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:
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.
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.
Eh, it's just one of the ways that HN tries to keep it pg.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
U+1F921
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?
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.
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).
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).
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.
Then include those languages. Emojis are not part of any language.
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.