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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Where are the emojis for pain? And why are there so many happy family emojis? People (and "corporate people") who care enough to get emojis put in by buy votes at the Unicode Club seem to have super weird values totally detached from humans who send each other messages.

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Have any "pain" emojis been rejected, or has merely nobody officially proposed them? (which anyone can do, no club membership required)

IDK, but either way the end result is a system which is unuseful for expressing common ideas.

In Japanese, ideographs (Kanji) are paired with syllabic characters (Hiragana) to express things which Kanji alone cannot. Foreign words are spelled in Katakana (another syllabic script). There's also romaji -- a way of writing Japanese in the familiar Latin alphabet.

Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.

The Unicode Consortium publishes a list of all the requests made to the Emoji Subcommittee.[1]

[1] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html

Emojis representing states of suffering number in the double digits.

I'm not sure people who would want pain emojis care enough to buy votes at the club.

Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.

Generally my go-to "upset" emoji are upside-down-smiley, or crying-laughing plus gun (still a real gun at least in Discord).

There's no time to cry / Happy, happy!

Maybe it’s just that people tend to use emojis for shallow, often humorous exchanges. If you have to express pain, using an emoji seems like a bizarre way to go about it rather than employing language.

Is that inherent to emojis, or is it a symptom of the current set of emojis being shallow and humorous?

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