Posted by ChrisArchitect 5 days ago
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.)
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
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).
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.
Just pointless madness.
And where does one stop in adding pictures?
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.
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.