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.
the problem is that some countries have majority skin colors and significant minority skin colors, and the majority has not been nice to the minority, so in those countries it's an issue and they sort of export the problem to everybody else via a process of memetic transferal.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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'.
I genuinely don't understand how this claim can be sincerely made in the contemporary American political climate. The entire point of pointing at "differential impact" is to take the premise that it's an inherent moral wrong, and can be pursued regardless of the underlying cause, or of the intent of anyone involved. That's why the term "institutional racism" was coined.
>Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?!
That's the point. They cannot. That's exactly why your argument that "they really have represented white people all this time" (as with the LEGO figures) doesn't hold water.
> 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.
This paragraph reads to me like you are trying very hard to claim that you didn't say what you said, by saying it again.
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.
>I fear you think that this issue is in some way political.
You are the one who started out the thread by suggesting that it's somehow weird that white people don't use white skin-tone emojis, while also arguing that "yellow-as-default" is somehow problematic and/or insincere.
Those are both plainly political. Identity politics, and racial politics, are politics. You are implying that people should change their real-world behaviour for reasons related to race.
The 'drama' wasn't your comment... and explaining it will just create more hand-wringing, so... imma just let it go but, it wasn't about what you said that I called 'drama'.
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
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.
There is nothing wrong with the majority becoming seen as a default. It is inevitable, because defaults are useful, and choosing anything else would increase the fraction of the time that it's wrong.
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?. Same as "native-american".
Or Italian American.
> 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.
African American is an alternative to "black". It was not invented to make a lesser form of "American". Your simple logic is just wrong, as these things frequently are.
When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
This context is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
> When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".
Well, as I say, Italian American is another one, and that's for white people. But more generally: these categories are (mostly) self-imposed (although I hear people who progressives would call "native American" actually call themselves "Indian"). African American is a substitute for "black", and driven by black Americans and progressives. It's a deliberate choice to enforce the label, just as it's a deliberate choice to have the n-word be, as they'd say, "our word". "people of color" is the same, although that's more an excluding category than an including one. This isn't coming from "systemic racism". It's coming from progressive academia, determined to re-divide America, and transitively everywhere else, in order to create some lovely social sciences problems to "solve".
You say its "progressive academia" but unless people are reading sociology research papers the way nearly all people come upon this is through mass media.
Is it now your theory to say that "progressive academia" controls mass media?
Or do you think its fine to say that somehow viewers themselves control mass media?
The truth is advertisers and shareholders control mass media.
Your statement also hinges on the assumption that america was united, at least on racial issues, and is now trying to be divided.
Back to the media. Your argument also uses the same rationalization as anti-DEI folks who blame a diversity-conspiracy when in reality it was just corporations (capitalism) trying to appear cool and understanding for more shareholder value. Every minority knew it was mostly a marketing gimmick by corporations (i knew).
The analogy here is that you take something the media did for money and externalize it as a social-sciences conspiracy.
The biggest mistake the masses do is thinking what the media and corporations do for money actually represents the will of the masses. That is the culture war.
The fact of the matter is that there is a racial-default bias within mass media and little plastic toy companies (lego) due to historical contexts. There's also racial tip-toeing to avoid being seen as racist due to company reputation and shareholder value. You are focused on the latter.
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
It is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
What were civil rights issues about if not that "american" literally didn't apply to all of us on a constitutional/federal/state and cultural level?
You seem to be fixated on pointing out that ultimate neutrality has always existed when referencing the term "american" when everything proves otherwise.
And on top of that you want to say I'm biased because I'm pointing out that neutrality hasn't always existed around that term.
> 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.
> why is "african-american" very common, but using "european-american" is almost non existent?
You’re a couple decades out of date. “African American” isn’t that commonly used anymore; the much more commonly used term is “black”. Or if you want to make a finer distinction, I’ve also seen the term ADOS (American Descendant of Slaves).
“Native American” is a neologism white liberals made up in the 1970’s because they didn’t like the term “American Indian”. It turns out almost all of the American Indians at the time preferred “American Indian” to “Native American”, but nobody actually asked them.
“European American” isn’t commonly used because at the same time that “African American” was popular, so was the idea that white people shouldn’t have a racial self identity at all so there was zero impetus to try and push a politically correct euphemism for “white”. Even today a common style decision is to always capitalize the term “black” but not the term “white”.
Furthermore, whenever we do talk about people in terms of nationality, such as during the Olympic Games, black Americans are consistently referred to as “Americans” rather than “African Americans”.
Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans. It’s just like whenever people talk about Japanese-American internment during WW2, they add “American” to underscore the injustice of treating US citizens that way. A Japanese national who wasn’t a US citizen could more justifiably be detained, just as Germans and Italians were, but treating Americans that way is beyond the pale.
What you’re doing here is taking a phrasing that was intentionally designed to use American patriotism to improve public perception of black people and twisting it around into yet another insidious form of crypto-anti-black racism using insane troll logic. And in that respect, you are the one missing the point.
I was explaining reasonings for lego defaulting yellow into white.
The defaulting of "american" into white does happen frequently in news headlines by simple fact of often referring to black people as "african americans" and white people simply as "americans".
And like someone else pointed out in the thread there have also been studies who have researched this topic. I think it's a real bias people/media seems to have.
You may have a point with your retelling of the history of terms, I dont really know and I wont pretend to know. Though i sense some racial resentment in you with your statement that white people shouldn't, or weren't allowed to, have a racial self identity. But that is beside the point.
> Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans.
I don't think it was to subjugate them I think those are after effects of this country who systemically subdued other races and identified itself as white. In part that will never go away because the majority is still white. But there is a latent bias in there. And that's what I'm pointing out.
You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism" when I point out that we come from a racist society. Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only. And that was almost 100 years AFTER slavery was abolished. The country was incredibly racist till relatively recently.
I am simply pointing out how the bias of a white nation still lives on in some way today and can be seen in the racial defaulting of little plastic figurine colors.
> You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism"
No, I'm saying you're accusing the people who coined the term "African American", or perhaps the term itself, of crypto anti-black racism.
> Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only.
80 years ago was 1945. Let me quote from the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 5, 1936, reporting on the performance of Jesse Owens in the Olympics. If you have access to newspapers.com you can follow this link to a clipping I created: https://www.newspapers.com/article/richmond-times-dispatch-j...
> The weather turned blustery with the day's usual shower but Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler and another capacity crowd of 100,000 jammed the big concrete stadium most of the day with Owens as the main magnet.
> Der Fuehrer joined in terrific applause accorded the American ace whose performances now have thrilled upwards of 300,000 spectators three straight days and given the Olympic games their most outstanding individual performer since Paavo Nurmi's exploits of 1924 when the "Phantom Finn" won three gold medals.
> After fouling on his first trial in the finals, Owens jumped 26 feet 39-64 inch, finally 26 feet 5 21-64 inches while the stadium echoed with a roar that could be heard all over the Olympic plant.
89 years ago, an American newspaper--one in the south, no less--referred to Jesse Owens, without any further qualification, as "the American ace".
> AMERICANS ROUT WORLD IN OLYMPICS
> Owens Cracks Broad Jump Record as U.S. Wins Four Events.
...
> The United States track and field forces put the athletes from the rest of the world to rout today in one of the greatest field days any nation ever experienced in Olympic competition.
> Four times the Stars and Stripes waved triumphantly from the victory flagpole as Uncle Sam's stalwarts staged a smashing exhibition of sprinting, leaping, and hurdling before a crowd of 110,000.
> Americans made a clean sweep of all championships in the men's division, retaining their broad jump supremacy with a record-breaking Olympic leap by John Cleveland (Jesse) Owens, 22-year-old Ohio State Negro...
The story does state Owens' race in a dated and uncomfortable way. (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?) But note that prior to doing so, the article twice includes Owens in statements about "Americans" routing the world and making a clean sweep of championships, and lauds him as one of "Uncle Sam's stalwarts". I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
> And so how does this relate to legos?
I would be justified in asking you the same question. Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Jesse Owens example is literally one example and one where they would have the obvious inclination for him to be in-group.
> (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?)
I don't think its awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someones race. I'm mixed and I identify as both black and white, purposefully.
I can tell how deep you are into the culture war because you seem to be arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure of me that you have in your head.
Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about?
Nah, ill tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm a sociology expert for internet points but there are many papers that show evidence of what I'm saying and they are not hard to find at all. Literally put a small amount of effort and you'll see at least 5 pop up. You can analyze their results if you want.
> Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Hilarious, dude. You totally lost the plot. I was using "american" vs "african american" bias as an analogy to explain the "yellow was universal" but that lego then decided to add brown lego figures. Yellow wasn't actually universal, yellow was white. White was then implicitly seen as universal.
He wasn’t even the only black American gold medalist from that day’s track and field competition. Regardless, you made the claim that the term “American” was never used, without qualification, to refer to black people prior to 1945. One or two counterexamples is enough to disprove such a claim.
> I don't think it’s awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someone’s race.
And I do. That’s part of the disagreement that we’re working through here.
> Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, I’ll tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I already addressed this. Repeating for clarity: I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
You made the very specific claim that the term “American” was not used to refer to black people prior to 1945. Now that I’ve demonstrated that this claim is false, you are using figurative language to retreat to the claim that black people were not historically treated equally to white people. But I have never disputed this. You are the one arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure in your head.
Furthermore, as I’ve already said, this is exactly the reason that the term “African American” became popular at one point: because it emphasized that black people were also Americans. Contrary to your false claim that it was meant as a backhanded implication that they weren’t Americans.
I'm not retreating into a wider claim. The civil rights issues were literally about "american" not meaning all of us legally.
That is my example for prior usage of the word "american" being biased. It was so biased that people willfully forgot the law and the constitution. Why does it not suffice?
Here is one more I recall:
“When I say all Americans — I mean all Americans...” President Truman when ending segregation in the army
I could keep looking up examples but I feel these are fundamental enough.
Yes african american emphasizes it, there was a need to do that. I wonder why?
Also I should add that I specifically dont give a damn about emoji color. I always leave default yellow cause i rarely use em anyways.
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.
> Well now you’re bringing white supremacy into a conversation that is more about white defaultism.... 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.
When you put this much effort into saying "actually these things that don't literally resemble a white person's skin tone totally are intended to represent a white person's skin tone, because it's kinda vaguely similar; and for a long period of time you had people using the yellow to pretend to be inclusive but they really were just thinking of white people when they did it", it's hard to read that as anything other than "... and that's bad, and reflects a morally bad unconscious bias in favour of white people".
> 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.
1. Why?
2. Why does the use of a smiley face to convey an emotion (no matter what colour it's drawn) have anything whatsoever to do with "identifying with" the face? What does it even mean to "identify with" a drawing?
> 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.
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.
The linked paper is too involved for me to really parse/grok, but I'm curious to know if the study(s) cited occurred before or after the introduction of skin-toned variations.
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Or, if the study(s) were post-variance introduction, people came to think the supposedly-neutral colour is 'actually' white.
Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality?
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'.
> 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.
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?
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?
> 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 […]
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?
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.
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.)
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.
Ah - I’m not actually making an argument on the subject of whether adding skin tone emojis is a good idea. I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
> I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong.
But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
I don't understand the request. There are no "particular kinds" of colour blindness in play here; in context, the term refers to one clearly defined concept — i.e., not taking race into consideration when making decisions about how to treat people. That this is a core liberal value is so self-evident that I can't fathom why support would be necessary. But try considering it from the perspective of Rawls' Veil of Ignorance, for example.
> 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).
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.
> […] I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.
> 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.
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.
> 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
Your analysis is ahistorical.
A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either.
More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media.
That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji.
> 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.
My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it:
* They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter
* They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy".
My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is.
And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)
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.
Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
>How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
>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.
This is, again, better levied against your position.
> Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
How? I don't feel forced by others having options or even the existence of a default.
>> Maybe being disgusted by others choices...
> This is, again, better levied against your position.
I'm not the one whose disgusted or even bothered. Not even by your opinion. (I just don't share it.)
>> How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
> Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
Thanks for clarifying. IMO you can just accept the defaults, whatever their tone/complexion, and move on. I don't think anyone is bothered by yellow being an imperfect attempt at race neutrality, so long as there are options for folks to pick whatever they're comfortable with.
> 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.
I disagree that this is objective at all.
But more importantly, I disagree that the smiley face is intended to be "representative" at all in the first place.
When USENET users typed ":)", do you suppose they cared about the text being black-on-white (or white-on-black, or green-on-black, or...) when their lips are actually red and their eyes might be any number of colours? No; the entire point was that you could convey "the foregoing is intended in a lighthearted way" in two bytes, and not spend many more bytes conveying information about your appearance (which you were more likely than not deliberately trying to conceal).
If for some reason the systems I used spontaneously changed so that the smiley-face emoji had a white skin tone that happened to match my own very well, and didn't offer any options to change that, I would not for a moment register any kind of feeling of "inclusion" or "representation". I would not care in the slightest about "huh, that looks like me". If I noticed at all, I would more likely be freaked out (why does the developer of this software know what I look like?).
Just like how, in the real world where there weren't options and the skin tone was that weird dark yellow, it never once occurred to me to complain, or feel insecure, about it not looking like me; nor did it occur to me to think about whether or not it was intended to look like me, or like a generic white person, or a generic person of any other race. These were just Not Issues Taking Up Mental Space until the Fitzpatrick modifiers were added to Unicode.
Also just like how, when I used the :mrgreen: emoji on ancient phpBB message boards (actually, the Linux Mint forums allow me to do this again!), I didn't think "but nobody is actually green", or "I wonder what race of person this is intended to be 'coded' as", or "if the yellow colour is actually 'white' then this green must be... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvsgEDKCgM".
I thought "oh, how whimsical".
And I can't come up with a mental justification for why people who aren't white should feel any differently about that sort of thing, that I could take at all seriously.
Imagine if professional work setting had initially started by employing a dress code with a full body yellow suit and a yellow mask that hides your gender and skin color to “avoid discrimination” and whatnot. It was universal.
Then, imagine that after a while, that rule was found too restricting and people were allowed to wear their own clothes and do away with masks.
When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender, or using their right as existing as the person that they are?
> When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender
Absolutely. But let me posit a scenario that’s actually realistic.
Suppose you’re running an orchestra. People are concerned about discrimination so you implement a blind audition policy where the auditioning musician can’t actually be seen by the people evaluating their performance. Afterwards, it turns out your orchestra is still predominantly made up of white and East Asian musicians so you decide to make the blind audition optional and make a bunch of tedious statements about how the orchestra isn’t diverse enough and you want more underrepresented minorities. What’s going to happen then is that the underrepresented minorities are going to do non-blind auditions because you’ve all but promised them you’d give them preference while the white and Asian musicians will continue doing blind auditions.
Your scenario is about hiring practices. What I'm talking about is a workplace setting; it means everyone is already hired, everyone already knows each other's skin color. Even if there are people who might want to take advantage of privileges based on their skin color, it wouldn't matter at the time. Even if it mattered, emoji wouldn't make a difference. I see no difference between using emojis with skin color and showing up to work without a head mask and a full body suit. Neither signals an agenda. It's just how we exist in society.
If someone feels that seeing a skin colored emoji as an imposition, and is forced to make a decision that they wouldn't otherwise do because of that emojji's color, they shouldn't be doing that job.
The difference is that nobody actually works in a head mask and full body suit, unless they’re wearing PPE that happens to obscure those things. Covering 100% of your skin is very awkward and uncomfortable. You wouldn’t ever want to do that unless you needed to for some other reason.
So let me propose another example that takes place in a workplace setting where everyone has already been hired. Let’s say it’s a welding shop where the workers are issued welding helmets, welding gloves, and protective long-sleeved overshirts. All of this PPE is provided by the shop. And let’s say that for several years, the PPE is all in the same standardized color, which is yellow because that’s the primary color of the company logo. One day the welding shop decides that, rather than just wearing the yellow PPE, they’re going to issue employees color-coded PPE that approximately matches their natural skin tone if that’s what they’d prefer. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad idea, you can’t deny that such a policy places a lot of significance on skin color.
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?
Without knowing anything about the particular person, in what ways a black thumbs-up is different than a non-skinned thumbs-up?
Adding a skin-tone is saying there ARE differences, but any difference you can name are actually prejudices about blacks. What was meant to be a simple "ok", "agree", etc. now is charged with an "I don't think you/others and me are the same kind of humans".
That's why using skin-tones in emojis is actually racist.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
Specific coloured emoji for people with a specific skin colour. Six thumbs up under a post about apple pie in the lounge now turns into five thumbs up in colour A and one in colour B. Suddenly the colour you pick, or don't pick in case of LEGO yellow, is a political statement. I can do without all that.
It's really only political if you think it is. Otherwise it's just people reacting with thumbs up. I've never once thought of it as anything else - and I've never seen it cause any sort of division. The idea that it could is absurd to me.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I never said they are the "most important", but simply they are "important". Your race or gender isn't the totality of who you are, but it is surely a part of you, your identity, and how people treat you. To ignore it also perpetuates racism, even among well-intentioned folks.
Really? I just pick colors at random. The skin color of an emoji is so utterly irrelevant, I don't see how one can break into a sweat over it... or why it is an option in the first place really.
If it's there, you might as well have some fun with 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.
This one is a stylised black square 'G' rotate 45° on a white circle in a red field. Definitely off-colour dev humour for internal use; but that has its place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I still don't understand what's wrong with Han unification now that we have variation selectors, as well as... those characters that describe ways of laying out CJK character components relative to each other (I know I've seen these, but I have absolutely no idea what they're called and can't for the life of me figure out how to search for them).
(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)
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.
What you've said is correct, but it also means Unicode strings containing CJKV characters become mildly corrupt if decoded without a "--interpret-as=<language>" option to change binary-glyph correspondence. That's just not what Unicode should stand for.
You should not need to keep or infer the language hint. I know it was always the officially sanctioned way and what developer engaged in i18n work has to live with. My point is NOT that you are wrong but that part of Unicode spec is wrong.
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
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.
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.
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.
Corporations didn't invent "them", but they definitely control them. Never mind the consortium, it's the corporations themselves who actually create the drawing that we see. And they definitely also created the typefaces that we use, like Times New Roman.
But overall, I don't think something is bad just because it's corporate. Do you think this is a bad influence of some sorts?
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Picture languages have all evolved into phonetic alphabets, because picture languages simply do not work. For example, you cannot look up a picture in a dictionary. You cannot look for it in an index. You cannot type it in, you have to search for it by scrolling through pages of them. You cannot tell if an icon for a duck is meant to represent a duck or a bird.
I'm always interested in seeing how logographic writing systems solve issues with input, encoding, indexing, and the like.
When I text my Japanese friends, we tend to use a lot of emoji and (in-app) stickers. I think emoji have such a hold in Japan because 1. there's a big "cute" culture there, and 2. Japanese language is largely icon-based (logographic) already.
When I see emoji all over Reddit comments, Github READMEs, and code docs, I feel a frustrating culture mismatch. I'm glad HN strips them. But, there are situations where I use emoji and like them a lot.
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 �.
Yes. They don't even release a baseline font themselves, it's all up to the people who create fonts to create the drawings. This is dissimilar to how for example the Alliance for Open Media works, where they create the spec, like AV1, and also release a reference version of the codec.
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.
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.
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 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.
As of 2022 the Unicode Consortium will not accept proposals for any new flags. Moving forward, anything with an ISO 3166-1 code will automatically get a flag. The Iraq Kurdistan subdivision mentioned below has a 3166-2 subcode, so doesn't automatically get a flag pushed though. They could've worded it less confusingly, but the rest of the article is quite thorough.
> As a recent example, Kurdistan (a subdivision of Iraq) became an official subdivision in ISO 3166-2 (IQ-KR) on May 3, 2021. The corresponding Unicode subdivision code (iqkr) is slated for release in CLDR v41 on Apr 6, 2022. At that point the flag for Kurdistan will officially be valid — any platform, app, or font could support it. But that doesn’t mean it automatically gets in the queue for everyone’s phone. Only countries with ISO 3166-1 region codes are automatically recommended and require no proposal to move forward.
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).
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.
I use emojis like a fiend, but I actually like that HN is just raw text. Something minimal about it. You can always go full kaomoji if you feel sad ; (◞‸◟)
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.
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.
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).
Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
LOL those evil Standards Body thugs, waiting in the shadows for you to open up a keyboard so they can jump out and force your fingers to type in specific emojis that you don't like! How dare they?
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 had no idea emoji were such a sensitive topic. This truly is a forum full of grumpy old men. I'll file this away as some of the best engineer ragebait I've ever seen.
It is, because if you think about it, it's a top-down approach to something intimately integrated into most everyone's lives - into engineers' lives for sure. As it's top-down, it will be applied to everyone (to an extent), and as the source of it is just a bunch of humans, it's beholden to politics and intricacy, and so, controversy as well.
A million things are like that, people are profoundly stupid, it's only ever an issue if someone invests money to cut propaganda against it to make people hate it. "Unicode gives us a shared codepoint space for all languages in the world, a deeply anti American idea, it fundamentally contradicts the ethno nationalist ideal our country was founded upon!"
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.
The way we think about time is very human-centric, and specifically it relates to individuals, not even to the lengths of civilizations. Even a human civilization is expected to last at least a thousand years. As for 4000 years or even 100,000 years, that would be nothing much to an AI. It would purportedly take several hundreds of thousands of years before sufficient memory corruption sank in to the point where algorithmically repairing the corruption, even if in a low steady dose, would be akin to neutering the individual identity of the AI.
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.
I think it makes sense that in a country where the majority is not white the yellow emoji is picked to represent the majority.
So you'd think white people in a minority white country would not use the standard emoji? I doubt anyone would care.
You might want to watch this. https://youtu.be/2ltWVmsbJxc
the problem is that some countries have majority skin colors and significant minority skin colors, and the majority has not been nice to the minority, so in those countries it's an issue and they sort of export the problem to everybody else via a process of memetic transferal.
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.
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.)
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”
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.
> 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'.
I genuinely don't understand how this claim can be sincerely made in the contemporary American political climate. The entire point of pointing at "differential impact" is to take the premise that it's an inherent moral wrong, and can be pursued regardless of the underlying cause, or of the intent of anyone involved. That's why the term "institutional racism" was coined.
>Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?!
That's the point. They cannot. That's exactly why your argument that "they really have represented white people all this time" (as with the LEGO figures) doesn't hold water.
> 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.
This paragraph reads to me like you are trying very hard to claim that you didn't say what you said, by saying it again.
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.
>I fear you think that this issue is in some way political.
You are the one who started out the thread by suggesting that it's somehow weird that white people don't use white skin-tone emojis, while also arguing that "yellow-as-default" is somehow problematic and/or insincere.
Those are both plainly political. Identity politics, and racial politics, are politics. You are implying that people should change their real-world behaviour for reasons related to race.
The 'drama' wasn't your comment... and explaining it will just create more hand-wringing, so... imma just let it go but, it wasn't about what you said that I called 'drama'.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
> Society (or media) assigned a racial default.
There is nothing wrong with the majority becoming seen as a default. It is inevitable, because defaults are useful, and choosing anything else would increase the fraction of the time that it's wrong.
You're absolutely right. But look up the thread at what was being said.
We were talking about "yellow" being racially neutral according to lego and how that was proven wrong by lego themselves.
Same thing happened in US media (by media i mean all mediatic content).
Its the cause of racialized realities. It absolutely is the result of racist societies.
And sure, the majority being a single race is a neutral fact today. But how we got there is absolutely through a racist history.
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?. Same as "native-american".
Or Italian American.
> 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.
African American is an alternative to "black". It was not invented to make a lesser form of "American". Your simple logic is just wrong, as these things frequently are.
> African American is an alternative to "black". It was not invented to make a lesser form of "American".
Man, I'm not saying its lesser. I'm talking about how its used.
I think you want to assign morality to my arguments when im being as neutral as possible.
In some widespread contexts "american" is racially defaulted to white. Full stop.
Like I said were not talking about the pure logical meaning of words were talking about how society uses them.
> In some widespread contexts "american" is racially defaulted to white. Full stop.
Can you say what these widespread contexts are? Question mark.
When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
This context is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
> When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".
Well, as I say, Italian American is another one, and that's for white people. But more generally: these categories are (mostly) self-imposed (although I hear people who progressives would call "native American" actually call themselves "Indian"). African American is a substitute for "black", and driven by black Americans and progressives. It's a deliberate choice to enforce the label, just as it's a deliberate choice to have the n-word be, as they'd say, "our word". "people of color" is the same, although that's more an excluding category than an including one. This isn't coming from "systemic racism". It's coming from progressive academia, determined to re-divide America, and transitively everywhere else, in order to create some lovely social sciences problems to "solve".
You say its "progressive academia" but unless people are reading sociology research papers the way nearly all people come upon this is through mass media.
Is it now your theory to say that "progressive academia" controls mass media?
Or do you think its fine to say that somehow viewers themselves control mass media?
The truth is advertisers and shareholders control mass media.
Your statement also hinges on the assumption that america was united, at least on racial issues, and is now trying to be divided.
Back to the media. Your argument also uses the same rationalization as anti-DEI folks who blame a diversity-conspiracy when in reality it was just corporations (capitalism) trying to appear cool and understanding for more shareholder value. Every minority knew it was mostly a marketing gimmick by corporations (i knew).
The analogy here is that you take something the media did for money and externalize it as a social-sciences conspiracy.
The biggest mistake the masses do is thinking what the media and corporations do for money actually represents the will of the masses. That is the culture war.
The fact of the matter is that there is a racial-default bias within mass media and little plastic toy companies (lego) due to historical contexts. There's also racial tip-toeing to avoid being seen as racist due to company reputation and shareholder value. You are focused on the latter.
> In some widespread contexts "american" is racially defaulted to white. Full stop.
No, this is a personal problem on your part.
I'll just copy part of my other comment:
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
It is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
> I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
You're in far less danger of being accused of originality than you are of regurgitating banality.
Non comment. Disregarded.
> I don't know why you think I would make this up
Because it's false, as I demonstrated in my other comment.
Like I said in the other chain:
What were civil rights issues about if not that "american" literally didn't apply to all of us on a constitutional/federal/state and cultural level?
You seem to be fixated on pointing out that ultimate neutrality has always existed when referencing the term "american" when everything proves otherwise.
And on top of that you want to say I'm biased because I'm pointing out that neutrality hasn't always existed around that term.
Chill out, dude.
> 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.
Your comments are becoming really tiring, it's like reading certain parts of Reddit or 4chan.
"European" is a racial identity more in the americas than in europe.
> why is "african-american" very common, but using "european-american" is almost non existent?
You’re a couple decades out of date. “African American” isn’t that commonly used anymore; the much more commonly used term is “black”. Or if you want to make a finer distinction, I’ve also seen the term ADOS (American Descendant of Slaves).
“Native American” is a neologism white liberals made up in the 1970’s because they didn’t like the term “American Indian”. It turns out almost all of the American Indians at the time preferred “American Indian” to “Native American”, but nobody actually asked them.
“European American” isn’t commonly used because at the same time that “African American” was popular, so was the idea that white people shouldn’t have a racial self identity at all so there was zero impetus to try and push a politically correct euphemism for “white”. Even today a common style decision is to always capitalize the term “black” but not the term “white”.
Furthermore, whenever we do talk about people in terms of nationality, such as during the Olympic Games, black Americans are consistently referred to as “Americans” rather than “African Americans”.
Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans. It’s just like whenever people talk about Japanese-American internment during WW2, they add “American” to underscore the injustice of treating US citizens that way. A Japanese national who wasn’t a US citizen could more justifiably be detained, just as Germans and Italians were, but treating Americans that way is beyond the pale.
What you’re doing here is taking a phrasing that was intentionally designed to use American patriotism to improve public perception of black people and twisting it around into yet another insidious form of crypto-anti-black racism using insane troll logic. And in that respect, you are the one missing the point.
And so how does this relate to legos?
I was explaining reasonings for lego defaulting yellow into white.
The defaulting of "american" into white does happen frequently in news headlines by simple fact of often referring to black people as "african americans" and white people simply as "americans".
And like someone else pointed out in the thread there have also been studies who have researched this topic. I think it's a real bias people/media seems to have.
You may have a point with your retelling of the history of terms, I dont really know and I wont pretend to know. Though i sense some racial resentment in you with your statement that white people shouldn't, or weren't allowed to, have a racial self identity. But that is beside the point.
> Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans.
I don't think it was to subjugate them I think those are after effects of this country who systemically subdued other races and identified itself as white. In part that will never go away because the majority is still white. But there is a latent bias in there. And that's what I'm pointing out.
You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism" when I point out that we come from a racist society. Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only. And that was almost 100 years AFTER slavery was abolished. The country was incredibly racist till relatively recently.
I am simply pointing out how the bias of a white nation still lives on in some way today and can be seen in the racial defaulting of little plastic figurine colors.
> You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism"
No, I'm saying you're accusing the people who coined the term "African American", or perhaps the term itself, of crypto anti-black racism.
> Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only.
80 years ago was 1945. Let me quote from the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 5, 1936, reporting on the performance of Jesse Owens in the Olympics. If you have access to newspapers.com you can follow this link to a clipping I created: https://www.newspapers.com/article/richmond-times-dispatch-j...
> The weather turned blustery with the day's usual shower but Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler and another capacity crowd of 100,000 jammed the big concrete stadium most of the day with Owens as the main magnet.
> Der Fuehrer joined in terrific applause accorded the American ace whose performances now have thrilled upwards of 300,000 spectators three straight days and given the Olympic games their most outstanding individual performer since Paavo Nurmi's exploits of 1924 when the "Phantom Finn" won three gold medals.
> After fouling on his first trial in the finals, Owens jumped 26 feet 39-64 inch, finally 26 feet 5 21-64 inches while the stadium echoed with a roar that could be heard all over the Olympic plant.
89 years ago, an American newspaper--one in the south, no less--referred to Jesse Owens, without any further qualification, as "the American ace".
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the same date: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-plain-dealer-owens-cl...
> AMERICANS ROUT WORLD IN OLYMPICS > Owens Cracks Broad Jump Record as U.S. Wins Four Events. ... > The United States track and field forces put the athletes from the rest of the world to rout today in one of the greatest field days any nation ever experienced in Olympic competition. > Four times the Stars and Stripes waved triumphantly from the victory flagpole as Uncle Sam's stalwarts staged a smashing exhibition of sprinting, leaping, and hurdling before a crowd of 110,000. > Americans made a clean sweep of all championships in the men's division, retaining their broad jump supremacy with a record-breaking Olympic leap by John Cleveland (Jesse) Owens, 22-year-old Ohio State Negro...
The story does state Owens' race in a dated and uncomfortable way. (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?) But note that prior to doing so, the article twice includes Owens in statements about "Americans" routing the world and making a clean sweep of championships, and lauds him as one of "Uncle Sam's stalwarts". I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
> And so how does this relate to legos?
I would be justified in asking you the same question. Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Jesse Owens example is literally one example and one where they would have the obvious inclination for him to be in-group.
> (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?)
I don't think its awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someones race. I'm mixed and I identify as both black and white, purposefully.
I can tell how deep you are into the culture war because you seem to be arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure of me that you have in your head.
Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, ill tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm a sociology expert for internet points but there are many papers that show evidence of what I'm saying and they are not hard to find at all. Literally put a small amount of effort and you'll see at least 5 pop up. You can analyze their results if you want.
> Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Hilarious, dude. You totally lost the plot. I was using "american" vs "african american" bias as an analogy to explain the "yellow was universal" but that lego then decided to add brown lego figures. Yellow wasn't actually universal, yellow was white. White was then implicitly seen as universal.
The culture warrior has ended themselves.
> Jesse Owens example is literally one example
He wasn’t even the only black American gold medalist from that day’s track and field competition. Regardless, you made the claim that the term “American” was never used, without qualification, to refer to black people prior to 1945. One or two counterexamples is enough to disprove such a claim.
> I don't think it’s awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someone’s race.
And I do. That’s part of the disagreement that we’re working through here.
> Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, I’ll tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I already addressed this. Repeating for clarity: I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
You made the very specific claim that the term “American” was not used to refer to black people prior to 1945. Now that I’ve demonstrated that this claim is false, you are using figurative language to retreat to the claim that black people were not historically treated equally to white people. But I have never disputed this. You are the one arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure in your head.
Furthermore, as I’ve already said, this is exactly the reason that the term “African American” became popular at one point: because it emphasized that black people were also Americans. Contrary to your false claim that it was meant as a backhanded implication that they weren’t Americans.
> The culture warrior has ended themselves.
Uncalled for and unnecessary.
I'm not retreating into a wider claim. The civil rights issues were literally about "american" not meaning all of us legally.
That is my example for prior usage of the word "american" being biased. It was so biased that people willfully forgot the law and the constitution. Why does it not suffice?
Here is one more I recall:
“When I say all Americans — I mean all Americans...” President Truman when ending segregation in the army
I could keep looking up examples but I feel these are fundamental enough.
Yes african american emphasizes it, there was a need to do that. I wonder why?
Also I should add that I specifically dont give a damn about emoji color. I always leave default yellow cause i rarely use em anyways.
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)?
(smileys in Japanese emojis pre-Unicode were mostly ham colored, not yellow)
https://www.docomo.ne.jp/info/news_release/page/20060711.htm...
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.
> Well now you’re bringing white supremacy into a conversation that is more about white defaultism.... 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.
When you put this much effort into saying "actually these things that don't literally resemble a white person's skin tone totally are intended to represent a white person's skin tone, because it's kinda vaguely similar; and for a long period of time you had people using the yellow to pretend to be inclusive but they really were just thinking of white people when they did it", it's hard to read that as anything other than "... and that's bad, and reflects a morally bad unconscious bias in favour of white people".
> 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.
1. Why?
2. Why does the use of a smiley face to convey an emotion (no matter what colour it's drawn) have anything whatsoever to do with "identifying with" the face? What does it even mean to "identify with" a drawing?
> 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.
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.
The linked paper is too involved for me to really parse/grok, but I'm curious to know if the study(s) cited occurred before or after the introduction of skin-toned variations.
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Or, if the study(s) were post-variance introduction, people came to think the supposedly-neutral colour is 'actually' white.
Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality?
The paper was written in 2021, the skin-tone modifiers were added in 2015.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
There's something about the yellow plastic version that feels more Lando, like it reflects some kind of distilled essence of the character.
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.
I was ready to criticize, but... he looks pretty perfect like that
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...
> 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 […]
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?
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.
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.)
[flagged]
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.
Ah - I’m not actually making an argument on the subject of whether adding skin tone emojis is a good idea. I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
> I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong.
But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
Can you support your statement that this particular kind of color blindness is a core liberal value?
I don't understand the request. There are no "particular kinds" of colour blindness in play here; in context, the term refers to one clearly defined concept — i.e., not taking race into consideration when making decisions about how to treat people. That this is a core liberal value is so self-evident that I can't fathom why support would be necessary. But try considering it from the perspective of Rawls' Veil of Ignorance, for example.
Why change to accommodate a bunch of personal preferences?
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
I get it, but I still wish I could use a non-realistic skin tone to match my mood instead of my body.
Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.
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.
> […] I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.
I remember thinking emoji are cheating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unicode is absolutely cheating. ;) :P
> 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.
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.
> 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
Your analysis is ahistorical.
A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either.
More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media.
That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji.
> 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.
My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it:
* They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter
* They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy".
My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is.
And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)
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.
>Is anyone forcing you to use a default?
Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
>How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
>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.
This is, again, better levied against your position.
>>Is anyone forcing you to use a default?
> Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
How? I don't feel forced by others having options or even the existence of a default.
>> Maybe being disgusted by others choices...
> This is, again, better levied against your position.
I'm not the one whose disgusted or even bothered. Not even by your opinion. (I just don't share it.)
>> How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
> Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
Thanks for clarifying. IMO you can just accept the defaults, whatever their tone/complexion, and move on. I don't think anyone is bothered by yellow being an imperfect attempt at race neutrality, so long as there are options for folks to pick whatever they're comfortable with.
> I don't think anyone is bothered by yellow being an imperfect attempt at race neutrality
The sheer length of the discussion suggests otherwise.
Is 5 comments really that deep? IMO it only suggests that misunderstandings and disagreements take a while to sort out in a text mediums.
Debate doesn't mean people are out to get you.
You're arguing with a... just read the comment history and don't waste your time.
> 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.
I disagree that this is objective at all.
But more importantly, I disagree that the smiley face is intended to be "representative" at all in the first place.
When USENET users typed ":)", do you suppose they cared about the text being black-on-white (or white-on-black, or green-on-black, or...) when their lips are actually red and their eyes might be any number of colours? No; the entire point was that you could convey "the foregoing is intended in a lighthearted way" in two bytes, and not spend many more bytes conveying information about your appearance (which you were more likely than not deliberately trying to conceal).
If for some reason the systems I used spontaneously changed so that the smiley-face emoji had a white skin tone that happened to match my own very well, and didn't offer any options to change that, I would not for a moment register any kind of feeling of "inclusion" or "representation". I would not care in the slightest about "huh, that looks like me". If I noticed at all, I would more likely be freaked out (why does the developer of this software know what I look like?).
Just like how, in the real world where there weren't options and the skin tone was that weird dark yellow, it never once occurred to me to complain, or feel insecure, about it not looking like me; nor did it occur to me to think about whether or not it was intended to look like me, or like a generic white person, or a generic person of any other race. These were just Not Issues Taking Up Mental Space until the Fitzpatrick modifiers were added to Unicode.
Also just like how, when I used the :mrgreen: emoji on ancient phpBB message boards (actually, the Linux Mint forums allow me to do this again!), I didn't think "but nobody is actually green", or "I wonder what race of person this is intended to be 'coded' as", or "if the yellow colour is actually 'white' then this green must be... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvsgEDKCgM".
I thought "oh, how whimsical".
And I can't come up with a mental justification for why people who aren't white should feel any differently about that sort of thing, that I could take at all seriously.
They should feel excluded if its a big deal to them.
> 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?
You don't make a statement that your skin tone is relevant simply by existing.
Neither do you by having your skincolor exist in your emojis.
I don't have to type my race when I write an email.
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.
Imagine if professional work setting had initially started by employing a dress code with a full body yellow suit and a yellow mask that hides your gender and skin color to “avoid discrimination” and whatnot. It was universal.
Then, imagine that after a while, that rule was found too restricting and people were allowed to wear their own clothes and do away with masks.
When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender, or using their right as existing as the person that they are?
> When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender
Absolutely. But let me posit a scenario that’s actually realistic.
Suppose you’re running an orchestra. People are concerned about discrimination so you implement a blind audition policy where the auditioning musician can’t actually be seen by the people evaluating their performance. Afterwards, it turns out your orchestra is still predominantly made up of white and East Asian musicians so you decide to make the blind audition optional and make a bunch of tedious statements about how the orchestra isn’t diverse enough and you want more underrepresented minorities. What’s going to happen then is that the underrepresented minorities are going to do non-blind auditions because you’ve all but promised them you’d give them preference while the white and Asian musicians will continue doing blind auditions.
Your scenario is about hiring practices. What I'm talking about is a workplace setting; it means everyone is already hired, everyone already knows each other's skin color. Even if there are people who might want to take advantage of privileges based on their skin color, it wouldn't matter at the time. Even if it mattered, emoji wouldn't make a difference. I see no difference between using emojis with skin color and showing up to work without a head mask and a full body suit. Neither signals an agenda. It's just how we exist in society.
If someone feels that seeing a skin colored emoji as an imposition, and is forced to make a decision that they wouldn't otherwise do because of that emojji's color, they shouldn't be doing that job.
The difference is that nobody actually works in a head mask and full body suit, unless they’re wearing PPE that happens to obscure those things. Covering 100% of your skin is very awkward and uncomfortable. You wouldn’t ever want to do that unless you needed to for some other reason.
So let me propose another example that takes place in a workplace setting where everyone has already been hired. Let’s say it’s a welding shop where the workers are issued welding helmets, welding gloves, and protective long-sleeved overshirts. All of this PPE is provided by the shop. And let’s say that for several years, the PPE is all in the same standardized color, which is yellow because that’s the primary color of the company logo. One day the welding shop decides that, rather than just wearing the yellow PPE, they’re going to issue employees color-coded PPE that approximately matches their natural skin tone if that’s what they’d prefer. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad idea, you can’t deny that such a policy places a lot of significance on skin color.
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.
Without knowing anything about the particular person, in what ways a black thumbs-up is different than a non-skinned thumbs-up?
Adding a skin-tone is saying there ARE differences, but any difference you can name are actually prejudices about blacks. What was meant to be a simple "ok", "agree", etc. now is charged with an "I don't think you/others and me are the same kind of humans".
That's why using skin-tones in emojis is actually racist.
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.
Only "Extremely Online" people think like this; you should consider going outside and touching some grass.
> 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.
Heterosexual people can use rainbow flags...
> to deliberately draw attention to it.
To specific aspects of it, even.
[dead]
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.
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.
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Better than this aggression in yours.
What aggression?
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.
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 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
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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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?
Specific coloured emoji for people with a specific skin colour. Six thumbs up under a post about apple pie in the lounge now turns into five thumbs up in colour A and one in colour B. Suddenly the colour you pick, or don't pick in case of LEGO yellow, is a political statement. I can do without all that.
It's really only political if you think it is. Otherwise it's just people reacting with thumbs up. I've never once thought of it as anything else - and I've never seen it cause any sort of division. The idea that it could is absurd to me.
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.
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.
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.
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
There's a big difference between "I wish Slack didn't have optional skin colors" vs "I wish Slack didn't have mandatory segregation"
iirc Slack will remember your chosen skin tone and will increment it based on that, rather than the first colour chosen
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 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.
Slack allows responding to a message directly as a separate thread. You can optionally put the reply into the main log.
We need a compromise: an image of "sounds good" that people can react with.
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.
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.
I never said they are the "most important", but simply they are "important". Your race or gender isn't the totality of who you are, but it is surely a part of you, your identity, and how people treat you. To ignore it also perpetuates racism, even among well-intentioned folks.
Here is some reading on the topic:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2022/09/28/newsflash...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-b...
A great book I can recommend is "Racism without racists" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
https://search.worldcat.org/title/Racism-without-racists-:-c...
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Really? I just pick colors at random. The skin color of an emoji is so utterly irrelevant, I don't see how one can break into a sweat over it... or why it is an option in the first place really.
If it's there, you might as well have some fun with it.
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?
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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
thank you for trying!
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.
Do you assume that a stalker would be deterred by the lack of a knife emoji? I can't seem to follow the logic here.
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.
Is the Grammar Nazi flag the Grammarly logo but with a swastika instead of the G?
This one is a stylised black square 'G' rotate 45° on a white circle in a red field. Definitely off-colour dev humour for internal use; but that has its place.
At that point just have a messaging standard that allows in-line small images.
Yeah, basically. I'm thinking of something like stickers on messaging apps but without the oversized graphics.
It's only a matter of time until Unicode adopts embedded SVG.
See Private Use Area perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
On your private site with your private client you can stuff whatever symbols you want for any particular code point I guess (§ Vendor use).
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.
:)
𓂺
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
The big difference between text emoticons and emojis is that emoticons are not defined by a committee.
RFC 9078 stans in shambles
What happened to the smiley-holding-heart emoticon?
It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...
Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.
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
:big-hypocritical-grin: please
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:
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 see what you did there :mrgreen:
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.
Yes, I can remember during Covid that people used golf club emojis for a cotton swab. That's what I call emojical poverty.
I shudder to be on the receiving end of these, using a phone with Apple "Intelligence" as its AI backend.
Genius indistinguishable from madness.
https://imgur.com/a/qA5aYso
I kind of love this idea...
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.
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.
Nice. Instead of "this meeting could have been an email" now we have "this meeting could have been an emoji."
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
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
I just want the gun to be a real gun again
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.
I'd be ducking outraged
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.
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
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.
I still don't understand what's wrong with Han unification now that we have variation selectors, as well as... those characters that describe ways of laying out CJK character components relative to each other (I know I've seen these, but I have absolutely no idea what they're called and can't for the life of me figure out how to search for them).
(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)
Also, they ought to accept the Tengwar script.
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.
What you've said is correct, but it also means Unicode strings containing CJKV characters become mildly corrupt if decoded without a "--interpret-as=<language>" option to change binary-glyph correspondence. That's just not what Unicode should stand for.
You should not need to keep or infer the language hint. I know it was always the officially sanctioned way and what developer engaged in i18n work has to live with. My point is NOT that you are wrong but that part of Unicode spec is wrong.
> Conflicting glyphs.
Which could be chosen between using variation selectors.
I guess, but I've never heard there's a `cat text | ivs-convert --from=utf8 --to=zh-Hans` type of things. So practically almost non-existent.
> 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.
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.
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/
I know that would as "loel" face
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.
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.
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...
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?
They look very different than their counterparts constructed from text. Also, many of them cannot really be constructed with regular characters.
People also have been adding smileys to their communication as early as the 1700s.
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.
Corporations didn't invent "them", but they definitely control them. Never mind the consortium, it's the corporations themselves who actually create the drawing that we see. And they definitely also created the typefaces that we use, like Times New Roman.
But overall, I don't think something is bad just because it's corporate. Do you think this is a bad influence of some sorts?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> thousands of new characters, new scripts, new symbols, and of course… new emoji.
Just pointless madness.
Can you elaborate?
Picture languages have all evolved into phonetic alphabets, because picture languages simply do not work. For example, you cannot look up a picture in a dictionary. You cannot look for it in an index. You cannot type it in, you have to search for it by scrolling through pages of them. You cannot tell if an icon for a duck is meant to represent a duck or a bird.
And where does one stop in adding pictures?
I'm always interested in seeing how logographic writing systems solve issues with input, encoding, indexing, and the like.
When I text my Japanese friends, we tend to use a lot of emoji and (in-app) stickers. I think emoji have such a hold in Japan because 1. there's a big "cute" culture there, and 2. Japanese language is largely icon-based (logographic) already.
When I see emoji all over Reddit comments, Github READMEs, and code docs, I feel a frustrating culture mismatch. I'm glad HN strips them. But, there are situations where I use emoji and like them a lot.
One reason I patronize HN is because it doesn't allow emoji pollution.
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 �.
It's also worth noting that the consortium is made up of members from big tech companies, among others:
https://unicode.org/consortium/directors.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium
Additionally, quite a few popular apps package their own emoji, at least in part. IIRC Firefox does this on Windows.
Yes. They don't even release a baseline font themselves, it's all up to the people who create fonts to create the drawings. This is dissimilar to how for example the Alliance for Open Media works, where they create the spec, like AV1, and also release a reference version of the codec.
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.
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.
So is there any way to update your installed emoji on windows? I'm stuck on 12.0
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 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.
I've been researching text encoding a lot lately, and man is it complex. But so much less complex than text rendering!
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)
Oh great, more stickers for children.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
I'm excited to see the Seahorse emoji.
Dragonfly, too. Or ZWJ sequences to create each of the My Little Ponies.
Still missing the sea horse, the pegasus, and the dragon fly.
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?
Never thought I'd say it but I really miss UCS-2.
Still bitter we never got the chainsaw emoji a few years back.
Still hoping for flag of Kurdistan to be included
As of 2022 the Unicode Consortium will not accept proposals for any new flags. Moving forward, anything with an ISO 3166-1 code will automatically get a flag. The Iraq Kurdistan subdivision mentioned below has a 3166-2 subcode, so doesn't automatically get a flag pushed though. They could've worded it less confusingly, but the rest of the article is quite thorough.
> As a recent example, Kurdistan (a subdivision of Iraq) became an official subdivision in ISO 3166-2 (IQ-KR) on May 3, 2021. The corresponding Unicode subdivision code (iqkr) is slated for release in CLDR v41 on Apr 6, 2022. At that point the flag for Kurdistan will officially be valid — any platform, app, or font could support it. But that doesn’t mean it automatically gets in the queue for everyone’s phone. Only countries with ISO 3166-1 region codes are automatically recommended and require no proposal to move forward.
https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...
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.
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).
U+1F921
So we have a treasure chest but still no lighthouse.
Or a submarine :(
I just want sitelen pona in Unicode already >:(
https://sites.google.com/view/sitelenemoji
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
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.
[dead]
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
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.
I like emoji in personal texting, but I personally like that they're stripped from HN.
I use emojis like a fiend, but I actually like that HN is just raw text. Something minimal about it. You can always go full kaomoji if you feel sad ; (◞‸◟)
Eh, it's just one of the ways that HN tries to keep it pg.
Very good pun, if intended
:)
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard.
Still no fig hand gesture emoji? Come on.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
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.
> 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.
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
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/
[flagged]
LOL those evil Standards Body thugs, waiting in the shadows for you to open up a keyboard so they can jump out and force your fingers to type in specific emojis that you don't like! How dare they?
It this the real bigfoot conspiracy theory?
real racists love those 'mojis, now you can be horribly racist just in a few characters!
They need to release an Epstein Files emoji!
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 had no idea emoji were such a sensitive topic. This truly is a forum full of grumpy old men. I'll file this away as some of the best engineer ragebait I've ever seen.
It is, because if you think about it, it's a top-down approach to something intimately integrated into most everyone's lives - into engineers' lives for sure. As it's top-down, it will be applied to everyone (to an extent), and as the source of it is just a bunch of humans, it's beholden to politics and intricacy, and so, controversy as well.
A million things are like that, people are profoundly stupid, it's only ever an issue if someone invests money to cut propaganda against it to make people hate it. "Unicode gives us a shared codepoint space for all languages in the world, a deeply anti American idea, it fundamentally contradicts the ethno nationalist ideal our country was founded upon!"
I'm inclined to agree. Even if people get worked up on the pregnant man emoji or whatever, it's not like anybody is forced to use any of it.
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.
The way we think about time is very human-centric, and specifically it relates to individuals, not even to the lengths of civilizations. Even a human civilization is expected to last at least a thousand years. As for 4000 years or even 100,000 years, that would be nothing much to an AI. It would purportedly take several hundreds of thousands of years before sufficient memory corruption sank in to the point where algorithmically repairing the corruption, even if in a low steady dose, would be akin to neutering the individual identity of the AI.
> 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.