Hacker News Reader

Why should we blame Unicode for this? Emoji-like features were used for a long time on Internet forums, in SMS-like mobile apps, and even as "dingbats" in printed text. Emojis in Unicode are simply standardizing support for this long-term practice and making it interoperable across systems.

>regression

how? it's just another way to communicate a thought/feeling/idea.

We really need a non-broken universal character set. Is anyone actually working on that?

Yes, that's what the Unicode consortium is doing.

If you look at https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ you will see that emoji is just a small part of it.

I know that there is some controversy, in particular regarding han unification, but in practice, Unicode works well enough.