Posted by lacieargyle 2 days ago
The best example in support of this is the cotton swab that we didn't have a symbol for during covid, and everybody was using a golf club [facepalm emoji here]
You are amazing 火火火火
- Non-suspicious eyes emoji. You know it looks suspicious but people use it to say "I'm looking at it".
- Yogurt cup emoji
- More button emojis for like warning [!] and question mark [?]. We have red X and Checkmark but what about warnings and infos? The emoji for warning and question aren't available in button form.
It’s funny, you can go look at the point at which Apple started touting emoji additions to their different OS updates and it coincides perfectly with the decline and staleness of their software ecosystem more generally. Not even the TikTok generation cares about emoji as much as you’d think they do based on how much effort and attention goes into emoji and documenting emoji changes (like with this submission).
Emoji could disappear entirely tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<
EDIT: I now realize that this "pretty good writeup" is by one of the people in charge of Emojis, and thus just made some aggressive editorial decisions. Leaving this comment up to remind others to check the Substack's author before commenting!
Incidentally, I wondered if this was going to be "I asked AI to generate the next 4000 emoji", and was pleasantly surprised to find some joyous, snacky linguistics content.
What in the hallucinogens are we talking about here? On the one hand, this is off the rails, in a way that feels AI, on the other hand, the only reference to "ryongface" out there seems to be this article. Even if I think that word could be corrected to … literally anything? … the rest isn't going to make much sense: "I'm going to kill you [winking emoji] — ha ha you flirt"¹ — seriously what?
¹(Still quoting the article, here.)
Had to do that once, pre-emoji. I have a domain in .com which is also a domain in .co.uk. That's owned by one of the famous British "public" (i.e. private boarding) schools. I used to have a catchall email address for that domain, and once in a while I'd get student emails, which I'd return with a note about why the right TLD matters.
One day, I got a student-to-student email "I am going to kill you tonight." No indication of humor. This was shortly after the Columbine massacre. I couldn't ignore it.
I'm in California, and the message was from the UK, where it was late at night. I had some trouble getting the right phone number, but after a while I was on the phone with the very British headmistress of the school, who'd clearly been awakened for this. Once I read her the message, she was thoroughly annoyed, but not at me. She recognized the student's name. It was made clear that someone was going to have a Very Bad Day. "He's only 12", she said.
If that message had come from a US school, there probably would have been a SWAT callout.
I agree. The lack of emojis on HN is an issue (for me).
it should not, in my opinion
Edit: hmmm it seems actually to be more of a problem with the symbols that are constructed by combining two emojis with a zerowidth char. Like the heart on fire one.
Both "heart" and "fire" match that emoji for me on multiple IMEs (GBoard, IBus).
- Bold
- Italic
- Strikethrough
- Underline
- Subscript
- Superscript
- Fixed width
- Color
Arguably those should be HTML, but users obviously want them to be available in plain text, because they have the kind of semantic meaning that unicode was meant to handle.