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.
Another aspect is contrast. We put such a lot of effort into getting adequate contrast between background and foreground, and then emoji skin tones destroy it.
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
I see emojis as purely semiotic. I don't expect to find personalisation or see myself reflected in them at all. Perhaps this is because of my age and use of emoticons in the BBS days of the late 1980s. Perhaps it's also because when i press for one on a screen, I still conceptualise that action as pressing a mechanical/physical button, where no customisation would be possible.
There are generic versions of all of them. All emojis have a base version without skin tone or gender applied. These are mostly displayed with yellow skin and a vaguely gender-neutral appearance. They're combined with modifiers to create the skin tone or gendered versions.
I just use the wrong emojis for my gender and skin tone. If anyone is truly offended by something as petty and insignificant as an emoji, it's like a scarlet letter warning me to not associate with them.
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).
Why cannot we at least make that UI-configurable? Everyone would select what gender and skin tone they want to see in their UI. Same as code colors -- there's one code, but everyone is free to configure their text editors to colorize whatever they want.
This is why I hate this kind of stuff. Another reason that text-based emoticons like in the old times were far better. Why does anybody need to render ":(" into "U+1F641"? Nobody would ever think of debating race because of ":(". Unicode is not just technically confusing but spread sociopolitical confusion as well, like a contemporary babel tower. We could survive just fine in ASCII times, and on fewer bytes too, even if we had to be creative in how to represent languages with different alphabets.
Skin tones for emojis shouldn't be a thing at all.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
I went through an emoji stage. Then realized I was wasting time looking for the perfect emoji and settling on an imperfect one. Then realized once again that a phonetic alphabet replaces all that nonsense.
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Are there any more heart emojis? I'm not sure we have enough with Beating Heart, Broken Heart, Two Hearts, Sparkling Heart, Growing Heart, Heart with arrow, Blue Heart, Green Heart, Yellow Heart, Purple Heart, Heart with Ribbon, Revolving Hearts, Heart Decoration.
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
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.
The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.
It would help if UIs made it easy to see the name of each emoji. Sometimes I even know what semantics I want but can’t discern which image it’s been assigned to.
A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.
Yes, this is a really large problem that limits their usefulness as a means of communication. I limit myself to the most basic set (and use them sparingly) to avoid misunderstanding.
Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.
Very interesting. I did the treasure chest emoji proposal back in 2018.
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
It is so amazing that the CJK Unified Ideographs block is still being extended to this day, even though I do know many intricacies of encoding those characters, like Z-variants and normalization rules and such. How many of these characters are left for encoding? I genuinely have no idea!
I honestly don't understand why Unicode still doesn't have all subscript and superscript letters, which I personally need to use almost every day--and I imagine many people who write math/code as well--but has 8 different varieties of alien emoji to choose from. I still can't write something as trivially simple as $1_G$ which would mean the "1" of group "G" (which is like being unable to write the word "the" if math was a language) because unicode lacks subscript G (capital) but I can send my wife a slideshow made solely of emoji. It's unfortunate.
Indeed. Wouldn't the more universal solution to simply add a special unicode "prefix/suffix" combining code that would signal that the next symbol is sub/super? Than you wouldn't have to wait years for your favorite char to have an extra variatn while cursing at all the emoji proliferation?
The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).
I feel bad for the poor unicode implementers these days, what a metric ton of work. How would folks go about partial implementations? Or using fallback fonts for missing points?
Unicode implementation was always a ton of work. Far as I can tell there have been few novel features beyond ZWJ sequences maybe? I don’t know if these are treated separately or as ligatures by engines.
The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.
I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.
So when Unicode releases a bunch of emojis, is it kinda like releasing a spec? Like Apple/android then has to have their designers go and actually draw all of the emojis from the spec?
In principle yes, but of course they don't have to. It's their own choice to have bespoke drawings. They also could just refuse to add the new emoji and just show �.
I would be more receptive to endless emojis if Unicode bothered to accept archaic and historical forms of characters as well as deprecating Han unification. It’s rather odd that they reject actual useful things while accepting endless objects that have never been found in any text prior.
I know several linguists who also know more than a little about computers. The number of times I've heard rants about the Unicode committee rejecting a perfectly valid historical character, yet adding more "modern hieroglyphics" (emojis)... well, let's just say that it's happened more than once.
Eh, Han unification was an one-off decision. Now many (but not all) characters have been disunified as needed, like the infamous Biang character [1] which received two different code points. Of course common characters are much less likely to be disunified, because at this point many decades have been passed after the initial encoding and any disunification would cause compatibility issues.
Probably the one thing I find most frustrating about these current unicode emojis is that they have been extended/evolved so far now that they fail to fulfil their original purpose.
Original purpose: simple/clear way to convey an emotional context to text
Current result: "What the heck is does face even mean?" or "Let's use these symbols as the basic for unintelligible slang."
(Bonus extra issue: Different implementations with subtly different images that imply a slightly different emotional context)
More often than not, I tend to default to basic old text emoticons, as it more clearly expresses the intent.
Unicode with an emphasis on emoji is HN ragebait. Out of all the things, people get really upset that U+1F9B0 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR is taking up codepoint space.
Please stop. We have too many already. I cannot keep up with all the double and tripple meanings. I do not dare use an emofji for fear of unintended meaning.
Just leave it alone for a few years.
I love using emojis but can't stand what it has turned into.
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
This feels more like a proposal for whatever emoji-picker you're using than for Unicode - I don't use most of the scripts defined by Unicode, and I don't use most of the emoji either. No one is forcing me to use every Unicode codepoint.
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
2000 vs 4000 makes no difference for the UI of a picker, and you can have your recently used/favorites with your 200 in the picker to avoid the long scroll
I basically still only use :), :(, and :P. I also have to "undo" it when they switch my chars to an actual emoji. The only one I wish were easier to show is ¯\\(ツ)/¯
Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
As much as I want HN to finally support markdown, I really want them to end the baffling anti-emoji stance. They’re adorable, versatile, fun, and useful - the only reason to ban them from forum comments is banal distaste for the new.
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
As a rock climber I anticipate wanting to use the rockfall emoji (not landslide) much more frequently than the sasquatch, though it depends how wild my climbing adventures get
I think HN should allow emojis but strip all colors out of them. Colors are what often makes emojis so annoying---without them they are just another characters.
It is sad to see the limited Unicode character space go to waste with these silly additions. The unallocated space should be reserved for future civilizations, AI intercommunication languages that are yet to come, extraterrestrial languages that will emerge, etc. Filling up the space with garbage dooms it.
At the rate at which new emojis are being added, the currently unallocated space would be exhausted in around 4000 years. However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard that is more or less agnostic to each language (is universally painful to work with), and yet they talk about the rollout in terms that only make sense to the northern hemisphere (seasons).
I mean this is just some blog, no? I guess quarters are technically a bit more inclusive, but it seems like small beans IMHO — the 12% of humanity living south of the equator is likely used to this sorta thing.
in fact, many proto languages were glyph based. human language and pictographs are intertwined— just look at how people use smileys, emoji, kaomoji, and more.
I‘m still a little mad about the fact that there are three alcoholic drink emoji but none for anything hemp-related. There where proposals for including them, but they where rejected. Another case of American puritanism determining online culture.
Really wish skintone+gender emoji variants weren't an option in Slack.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
I sympathize. But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow; while all the other Star Wars characters they had already made yellow without a second thought rather gave the game away that maybe yellow minifigs are actually white people. And it’s not a fluke: The Simpsons are exactly the same.
The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
> 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?
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.
Just use yellow then? You don’t have to broadcast your skin ton, and for those that it matters to they can.
I see emojis as purely semiotic. I don't expect to find personalisation or see myself reflected in them at all. Perhaps this is because of my age and use of emoticons in the BBS days of the late 1980s. Perhaps it's also because when i press for one on a screen, I still conceptualise that action as pressing a mechanical/physical button, where no customisation would be possible.
There are generic versions of all of them. All emojis have a base version without skin tone or gender applied. These are mostly displayed with yellow skin and a vaguely gender-neutral appearance. They're combined with modifiers to create the skin tone or gendered versions.
I just use the wrong emojis for my gender and skin tone. If anyone is truly offended by something as petty and insignificant as an emoji, it's like a scarlet letter warning me to not associate with them.
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.
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.
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?
Or people can be themselves and their skin tone?
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
Why cannot we at least make that UI-configurable? Everyone would select what gender and skin tone they want to see in their UI. Same as code colors -- there's one code, but everyone is free to configure their text editors to colorize whatever they want.
This is why I hate this kind of stuff. Another reason that text-based emoticons like in the old times were far better. Why does anybody need to render ":(" into "U+1F641"? Nobody would ever think of debating race because of ":(". Unicode is not just technically confusing but spread sociopolitical confusion as well, like a contemporary babel tower. We could survive just fine in ASCII times, and on fewer bytes too, even if we had to be creative in how to represent languages with different alphabets.
Skin tones for emojis shouldn't be a thing at all.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
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?
> 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.
I went through an emoji stage. Then realized I was wasting time looking for the perfect emoji and settling on an imperfect one. Then realized once again that a phonetic alphabet replaces all that nonsense.
I don't understand this kind of thinking at all.
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Very strange comment.
How about when a group chat has five different skin toned thumbs up reactions? So much for reaction based polls.
Hmm. They should add indeterminate gender for all gendered emojis
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.
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...
>Are there any more heart emojis?
I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394
...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters
This is all so archaic. Why are we sticking to a hard coded list? Instead, we just need emoji_start and emoji_end codepoints. The text between is rendered by AI into an emoji.
:homer_simpson_unsure_if_joking_or_not_meme:
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.
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 shudder to be on the receiving end of these, using a phone with Apple "Intelligence" as its AI backend.
This is pretty much how Apple's genmojis work, but because they're platform specific, they get sent as png images.
Genius indistinguishable from madness.
https://imgur.com/a/qA5aYso
I kind of love this idea...
The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.
It would help if UIs made it easy to see the name of each emoji. Sometimes I even know what semantics I want but can’t discern which image it’s been assigned to.
A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.
This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.
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!
Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.
I know that would as "loel" face
Reminds me of World of Goo.
I played it on Wii, but you can play it on your phone or computer too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/22000/World_of_Goo/
Me and my friends call him (the Open Eye Crying Laughing Face) Rolf. Would love it if Rolf made it into Unicode
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.
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!
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.
I honestly don't understand why Unicode still doesn't have all subscript and superscript letters, which I personally need to use almost every day--and I imagine many people who write math/code as well--but has 8 different varieties of alien emoji to choose from. I still can't write something as trivially simple as $1_G$ which would mean the "1" of group "G" (which is like being unable to write the word "the" if math was a language) because unicode lacks subscript G (capital) but I can send my wife a slideshow made solely of emoji. It's unfortunate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
Indeed. Wouldn't the more universal solution to simply add a special unicode "prefix/suffix" combining code that would signal that the next symbol is sub/super? Than you wouldn't have to wait years for your favorite char to have an extra variatn while cursing at all the emoji proliferation?
The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
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.
They need to stop. The list is becoming ridiculously long.
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).
I feel bad for the poor unicode implementers these days, what a metric ton of work. How would folks go about partial implementations? Or using fallback fonts for missing points?
Unicode implementation was always a ton of work. Far as I can tell there have been few novel features beyond ZWJ sequences maybe? I don’t know if these are treated separately or as ligatures by engines.
The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.
I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.
> thousands of new characters, new scripts, new symbols, and of course… new emoji.
Just pointless madness.
So when Unicode releases a bunch of emojis, is it kinda like releasing a spec? Like Apple/android then has to have their designers go and actually draw all of the emojis from the spec?
In principle yes, but of course they don't have to. It's their own choice to have bespoke drawings. They also could just refuse to add the new emoji and just show �.
I would be more receptive to endless emojis if Unicode bothered to accept archaic and historical forms of characters as well as deprecating Han unification. It’s rather odd that they reject actual useful things while accepting endless objects that have never been found in any text prior.
I know several linguists who also know more than a little about computers. The number of times I've heard rants about the Unicode committee rejecting a perfectly valid historical character, yet adding more "modern hieroglyphics" (emojis)... well, let's just say that it's happened more than once.
Eh, Han unification was an one-off decision. Now many (but not all) characters have been disunified as needed, like the infamous Biang character [1] which received two different code points. Of course common characters are much less likely to be disunified, because at this point many decades have been passed after the initial encoding and any disunification would cause compatibility issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode
Never thought I'd say it but I really miss UCS-2.
Still hoping for flag of Kurdistan to be included
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.
So is there any way to update your installed emoji on windows? I'm stuck on 12.0
Unicode with an emphasis on emoji is HN ragebait. Out of all the things, people get really upset that U+1F9B0 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR is taking up codepoint space.
what unicode miss is mimosa's branches and italian cards (I really want to send a three of clubs or a seven of coins to some of my friends)
I'm excited to see the Seahorse emoji.
Please stop. We have too many already. I cannot keep up with all the double and tripple meanings. I do not dare use an emofji for fear of unintended meaning. Just leave it alone for a few years.
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard.
Oh great, more stickers for children.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
I just want sitelen pona in Unicode already >:(
https://sites.google.com/view/sitelenemoji
Why no soldier profession emoji?
There are British soldiers.
https://emojipedia.org/guard
What country's uniform would they wear?
Still no fig hand gesture emoji? Come on.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
Still bitter we never got the chainsaw emoji a few years back.
So we have a treasure chest but still no lighthouse.
Or a submarine :(
I love using emojis but can't stand what it has turned into.
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
This feels more like a proposal for whatever emoji-picker you're using than for Unicode - I don't use most of the scripts defined by Unicode, and I don't use most of the emoji either. No one is forcing me to use every Unicode codepoint.
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
2000 vs 4000 makes no difference for the UI of a picker, and you can have your recently used/favorites with your 200 in the picker to avoid the long scroll
I basically still only use :), :(, and :P. I also have to "undo" it when they switch my chars to an actual emoji. The only one I wish were easier to show is ¯\\(ツ)/¯
> 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
Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
https://www.orcas.pt/
As much as I want HN to finally support markdown, I really want them to end the baffling anti-emoji stance. They’re adorable, versatile, fun, and useful - the only reason to ban them from forum comments is banal distaste for the new.
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
As a rock climber I anticipate wanting to use the rockfall emoji (not landslide) much more frequently than the sasquatch, though it depends how wild my climbing adventures get
Feels like there is something missing every time I use a forum that doesn't support phpBB smilies.
I think HN should allow emojis but strip all colors out of them. Colors are what often makes emojis so annoying---without them they are just another characters.
Eh, it's just one of the ways that HN tries to keep it pg.
It is sad to see the limited Unicode character space go to waste with these silly additions. The unallocated space should be reserved for future civilizations, AI intercommunication languages that are yet to come, extraterrestrial languages that will emerge, etc. Filling up the space with garbage dooms it.
At the rate at which new emojis are being added, the currently unallocated space would be exhausted in around 4000 years. However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.
Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard that is more or less agnostic to each language (is universally painful to work with), and yet they talk about the rollout in terms that only make sense to the northern hemisphere (seasons).
U+1F921
I mean this is just some blog, no? I guess quarters are technically a bit more inclusive, but it seems like small beans IMHO — the 12% of humanity living south of the equator is likely used to this sorta thing.
Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
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.
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.