Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms.
Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms.
Related: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion.
Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.
Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode. In practice, the consortium has to prioritize what symbols to support. So, in practice, it's less "embracing all variants of human expression", and more "the ability to communicate in your native language doesn't matter as much as the gender identity of this police emoji".
And while you’re correct that emojii do require some amount of UTC resources, it’s worth noting that most of that work is done by a special subcommittee to not distract from the mainline work of other languages, and that emojii have brought new attention and new volunteers to TUC - so I’m not sure how significant the impact of adding emojii to their workload really is.
In any case, please see the comments on the HN post (linked by a sibling comment) for that. The issue is in fact wickedly complex, and it’s not clear (even among Bengali speakers) that this is a deficiency in Unicode (vs a deficiency in text entry and rendering software).
I would summarize the key issues here, but they are complex and I don’t feel qualified to do them justice.
We're talking about emoji for crying out loud, the entire idea is frivolous (and that's fine!)
For example, the US flag is composed(?) as U+1F1FA U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U) and U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S).
It can get even crazier with “emoji tags”[1]. Say you want to encode the flag for California, US. You’d think it’d be done using those regional indicators as “CA”, but that’s actually Canada. The way to do it is: U+1F3F4 U+E0075 U+E0073 U+E0063 U+E0061 U+E007F. This encodes a black emoji flag, “USCa” in tag characters, and a “tag cancel” code point.
Basically, if your font has symbols for countries that don’t exist yet, or are missing some, that’s on the font designer, not Unicode.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
So all that to say: Unicode is still representing language and/or written culture as it is at a point in time (which may be less relevant in the future) - and that’s OK, and absolutely compatible with their aims.
It's true that "any number of people" in this tread believe that the consortium's efforts towards skin tone variants are a good thing. Is anybody here calling for more work to be done in this area? Those are the people who I'd make a similar recommendation to.
Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.
It's almost like there's a correspondence with the "average" yellow Simpson's character and some real world US ethnic majority...
Despite all clearly having signifiers of white people, and several of them clearly ethnically Italian or German, and most of the rest being Waspy?
Does this not simply speak of what you perceive as the "null race" or, perhaps, default race?
And when the Simpson's producers said a few years ago that they were going to stop voicing non-white characters with non-white actors, who did they find to voice all the "null-race" characters?
What does that mean though? I see Fat Tony as Italian-American, Rainier Wolfcastle as Austrian, and Akira as Japanese. The majority of the population of Springfield, which is supposed to be somewhere in North America, is probably "white".
So the context of the show itself, and how characters are portrayed imply their race/nationality. This is not true of an emoji.
Would dark mode users prefer yellow?
Maybe.
This is a great example. All the yellow characters in The Simpsons are coded white (from my recollection).
Nobody is actually yellow, but bright yellow skin is very clearly obviously not black or dark brown; it's much more functionally similar to light skin tones.
Maybe the "true" solution would be to use a color that's completely different from all skin tones, such as a very deep blue color. But my immediate reaction to the thought of deep blue emoji is that I wouldn't identify with them - which, again, kind of proves the point that bright yellow is much easier to identify with for light-skinned people
That said, the on-going work into representing all humans in emojis is wonderful, and I really admire the clever technical solutions like this handshake proposal.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/76/PBS_Kid...
not true.
asians are a lighter tone: https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Osaka-Flu...
carl is black: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/2/29/Numbe...
the hispanic bee guy: https://img.chilango.com/2014/11/el-hombre-abejorro.jpg
in The Simpsons, yes.
I wonder if it's possible to avoid that. What if at the outset, we'd used a different color for every emoji? Smile could be green, frown could be blue, wink could be yellow, etc.
There are also some episodes that are very clearly explicitly about race. If nothing else, the use of n-word makes it super clear who is white.
I think it would also be unnecessary to add modifiers to unicode that let me, say, represent a glyph of a man in a dress, or a modifier that lets you use those family emojis while clarifying that one of the parents is an amputee. Just because you can find someone who can write a twitter thread on why those additions are absolutely necessary doesn’t mean I’m lazy or disdainful or, let’s say, transphobic/ableist.
Any argument to the contrary really needs to examine from what angle they're making their argument because they are not based on empathy but something of the opposite.
You could make your same argument for “latinx”. Who cares if people on NPR say it? It’s harmless and inclusive! Well, that’s where we disagree.
Once again, attacking arguments that you disagree with by asserting they come from a place of bad character isn’t a discussion. It also seems like you risk giving yourself too much credit by seeing your views as some sort of paragon of virtues like empathy, thus anyone who disagrees must be against your self-appointed virtues.
The arguments against are not based on any logical or rational footing (because adding them is trivial and people want them to be added) so the assumption is that they are making arguments on emotion. Why would someone argue against inclusion based emotion? Because they don't want to be inclusive. You don't have to arrive at this conclusion because you believe you have some moral superiority, you can arrive on it based on common sense.
How convenient it must be to believe oneself to be in exclusive possession of logic and reason. This is not the way to charitably interpret an argument.
The biggest reason these features should never have been added in the first place: the more opportunities everyone has to notice and be reminded of everyone's differences, the longer those differences will remain divisive.
The saying used to be, "On the Internet nobody knows you are a dog." We were all brought together by the common language of text. I became friends with people of many nations, colors, and sexual backgrounds. Now, every single interaction has to be labeled with your "identity," as if a single color code point could remotely capture that, and it drives us all apart.
This is amplifying exclusivity in the name of inclusivity.
So because people are discriminatory, we shouldn't be more inclusive at the risk of enabling those who...discriminate? The only reason these issues are divisive is because those who are insecure with their personal identity make them divisive. We shouldn't appease discriminators at the cost of letting people express their true identities.
Also, you cannot "remotely capture" ethnicity and culture in a single color code, even yellow. Yellow is light and implies a lighter skin. It's inherently (no matter how you want to argue it) promoting or portraying human skin as light.
I'm not sure where you get to your conclusion but it seems like, based on the adoption of skin tone variants, the only ones amplifying exclusivity are those that want things to stay exclusive.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got a really nasty email accusing me of being all sorts of racial things, because I hadn't included skin tones. I don't know if this person was just trolling or crazy or what, but they were really mad! I'd never received an email like this before, so I was pretty upset.
1: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...
It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages.
After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard:
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-re... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf
Based on this, the Consortium refined it into their own proposal that used the Fitzpatrick scale for skin tone modifiers:
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf
And then, eventually, these were included in Unicode 8.0.
What this shows is if you inject the concept of racial self-identity onto cartoon symbols, and afford people a way to navigate that selection, people can do that. Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial.
Usage clearly states otherwise. No one is forced to use a particular skin tone (they can continue using the default yellow one).
This comment frankly is quite dismissive. Just because you don't use a feature doesn't mean "no one wanted it".
You would need to have a theory of benefit, and then design a survey which tests users to understand if that benefit was achieved. You, frankly, are confused about causation -- we put a dialog in front of people and they made a selection, therefore people wanted this dialog?
You're suggesting that it's impossible for people to have wanted a feature, because UXs have a popup showing people that it's possible to use that feature now. I disagree. You're projecting your personal opinion as everyone's personal opinion.
And that emoji picker still allows you to pick the default yellow color. So if people -really- didn't want to use them, they wouldn't.
Yeah, it does mean those people want it.
There's literally no other way to interpret it.
Or, people can suffer through a certain amount of bullshit in order to get to their goals. The word you're looking for is "instrumental" -- there's your missing interpretation.
At some point in the past ten or so years, the cultural discourse has devolved to such an extent that people cannot think even one move ahead. Zero tolerance manicheanism rules everything now.
People are clearly using the emoji they want because they want to in and of itself, end of story.
They're not doing it to satisfy the government or access software or whatever. And no, I'm not looking for the word "instrumental", because emoji are about expression, which is literally the polar opposite of something being instrumental.
Sometimes it's not about looking twenty moves ahead. Some things are just valuable in and of themselves. Some things are about the moment. Perhaps that's the perspective you're missing here?
Just because some things are instrumental doesn't mean everything is. And thank goodness for that!
Just one look at the way these color pickers are presented on first use, and how that selection becomes the default thereafter, tells you everything you need to know about the flimsy basis of your claims. The picker pops up and interrupts you while you're in the middle of writing a message, and then persists your choice. It's a speed bump on the way to your actual goal -- gosh, does anyone have a word for that sort of thing?
A person would have to be mighty well motivated to believe that this would be evidence of a latent demand for self-expression via skin tone.
I have literally never seen this, can you provide a few examples? I'm curious how it's presented.
The difference is big enough to make original statement lie - inflammatory lie that makes people outraged over something that dont exists.
How would you recommend which emoji color I should pick? How do you imagine most people would navigate that decision?
>The difference is big enough to make original statement lie - inflammatory lie that makes people outraged over something that dont exists.
I'm very sorry that your notions of epistemology and morality are this underdeveloped, for you to be so confused about what lies are.
Think for yourself, pick what you want to pick
The second choice for me would be the least bright one. I don't like how shiny bright colors mixed into text.
So the entire exercise is tautological -- of course people pick a skin color, when you frame the choice as "pick your skin color before you send this (or don't and we'll just keep using the inhuman color, which might communicate its own signal, or just look weird when everyone else has a skin tone)". And of course it's meant to be informed by race.
We decided to present skin tone (race) as something important, and people responded as though it's important, is not a surprising finding.
Eh? Never having set it, I went looking for the setting in Slack. It's so discreet that I had to Google it. I still have no idea where it might be in MacOS.
The idea that this is being forced on people is kind of absurd.
This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null.
But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
With emoji, it’s different - it’s explicitly about inserting race into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this type of thing is generally worse for society. It leads to people thinking about our differences more than our similarities.
But was it really?
Serious question: Do you think that if the majority of people in the US, and particularly the majority of middle and upper classes and tech folk, were Black that they would have defaulted to a yellow color for emoji?
That's not even getting into how all the "man" "woman" "child" etc emoji had stereotypical white-people hair etc.
I’d argue the direction should be towards generality not identity specificity.
I’m not dogmatic and obviously my point of view on this is a lost cause, but I generally think the universalist ideal is better and should be the goal.
I do think yellow was intentionally chosen to be universal and not to be read as “white”.
I'm guessing yellow was chosen to match the yellow "smiley face" which few had objected to historically
[0] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/boy/
[1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/person-wearing-turban/
Emojis are the same to me, in that they were introduced with very limited scope (original ones were simple outlines, with bright pink, blue or green faces). Then expanded and got more detailed, less caricatural, and stopped fitting a single byte.
IMO the can of worm got opened the moment we got detailed drawings with artistic choices that best match one category of people. We have shown we weren't limited in number, and accepted a ton of complexity to deal with flags or gender representations for instance, it would be tone-deaf to just go on saying it's too complex to also care about racial representations where they might apply.
If you're arguing for getting back to simple outlines of random colors, I'm with you. But I think we're not in a stable place right now to say "we made enough diversification, let's just stop here".
Yes that is what I want. I basically agree with everything you said - I just wish we chose generality over specificity.
You have it - use the yellow emoji.
If that's not good enough, then commission your own emoji font. Or, don't use emojis/don't use Unicode. And let other people communicate in the way that they want.
I do use the neutral colors, I just think inserting identity into something is a worse outcome. Generality would be better.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049269
Or this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049517
Identity is extremely important to communication - I, personally, am communicating my opinion to you, personally.
If you want to stick to [what you consider] neutral or impersonal language in whatever aspect, you can. That option hasn't been removed from you.
If you want to impose your preference on others, that is to prevent other people from communicating effectively. I don't respect that.
Race is socially constructed, lines between 'races' dissolve and change over time. Reinforcing our differences in software and communication unnecessarily over arbitrary categorizations and physical characteristics is worse for society (imo).
I think people should generally have the freedom to do what they want, but defaults and incentives matter - it's better to choose ones that lead to a better outcome when possible. That's all I'm getting at.
Emojis literally offer people the choice to use "Light Skin Tone", "Medium-Light Skin Tone", "Medium Skin Tone", "Medium-Dark Skin Tone" and "Dark Skin Tone".
Those are not racial differentiators.
If it was just hair color or something it would be different. It shouldn't be different (imo) and hopefully we eventually get to a world where they're just physical attributes. I just don't see this kind of thing helping in the mean time.
And now we have superheroes band aids, Elsa band aids, transformers band aids, teddy bear band aids.
It started out with the 'base' symbols of a bunch of Japanese mobile carriers:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#The_origin_of_emoji_pict...
If they simply stuck with supporting those for legacy reasons, then things would have been fine. But no line in the sand was drawn.
IMHO there should be a moratorium for (say) five years to let things settle, and see new ones are actually needed, or if it's just inertia driving recent additions.
Frankly I think it's a bad look when people suddenly become very passionate about opposing updates once they are reminded of the existence of dark skinned emojis. They're just silly little drawings, people. If someone is so upset by others being able to send silly little drawings that vaguely resemble themselves, they should do some introspecting.
* Grinning Face {, Big Eyes, Smiling Eyes, Sweat}
* (Slightly) Smiling Face {, Smiling Eyes, Halo, Hearts, Heart-Eyes}
* (Wo)man {,Bald, Red Hair, Curly Hair, White Hair, Blond Hair}
* Family: {{,M,W}, {M,W}, {,B,G}[1-2] }
* Leg, Foot, Ear (with Hearing Aide), Nose, Brain, Longs, Tooth, Bone, Eye(s), Tongue, Mouth
* {, Man, Woman} {Superhero, Supervillain, Mage, Fairy, Vampire, Elf, Genie, Zombie}
How many combinations / permutations do we need?
That's a dodge. You proposed a five year moratorium on new emoji. I'm asking what harm is caused by these that justifies that.
"I personally find them pointless" isn't a great reason to deny the folks who clearly find proposing and implementing them to be worthwhile.
(Side note: "Update your device to get the new emoji" is a great way to get folks doing their security patching regularly.)
* https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
Coloring Black and Asian characters with skin tones, means that yellow in the Simpsons represents only white people.
So yes it seems silly, but I think a default of blue or green would be better.
awfully confident take.
And what would someone use a handshake emoji for exactly?
I am not a fan of how Unicode has treated emojis, but there is no question they are completely within scope in principle (they were part of extant keitai character sets) though the way they are being extended by the UCS makes me uncomfortable.
But so what? People like to use them which seems like enough justification.
[0] https://emojipedia.org/docomo/
[1] https://emojipedia.org/softbank/
edit: although to be fair to Softbank, it seems their initial color version had pink faces https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/
Until that happens, there are probably bigger fish to fry.
With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation.
TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.
The wave-hand emoji with a black colour allows you to compactly say "+1 as a black person", for example. That means emojis now support conversations about race. I've seen it used exactly like this in the wild in multiple fora.
There is more to language than debate-club argumentation, too. Consider - why is it important what gender someone is? Or age? Should emoji only have had unisex and age-less figures instead of its current set? Is it sexist to use a female-presenting emoji?
These things all have obvious utility for communication, and you're ending up making some deeply strange arguments to try and dismiss that utility.
It really isn't when it comes to arguments. An argument should not be attached to whoever brought it up. If it is it's hardly an argument and most likely something personal or morally loaded which is not suited for objective discussion.
> Should emoji only have had unisex and age-less figures instead of its current set?
Yes!
> Is it sexist to use a female-presenting emoji?
Obviously not and I don't know why you would get the impression it is. It is however mostly irrelevant: So now people assume you are an XX chromosome female or are trying to present as one. What now? Do you expect special treatment now?
> These things all have obvious utility for communication,
No they don't? And I don't know what would be "obvious" about it? You can't just present this as "obvious" fact when it's really not clear at all.
> and you're ending up making some deeply strange arguments to try and dismiss that utility.
You did not explain to me why my arguments are "deeply strange" and you also failed to explain why it should be useful to convey your own skintone in the context of discussion. My argument is that all you do with skintones and a nursing male is to bring political discrimination into electronic discussion, without providing any benefit whatsoever or even doing harm.
Emoji is used for more than arguing or "objective discussion"!
Emojis are used for friendship, for flirting, for jokes, for sexting, for gossiping, for nattering. "I'm a woman who likes to dance", "I am white", "oh but I'm an old man" — these are all valid statements people say to one another; adding this capability allows emoji to be used to convey these meanings.
If your argument is "people shouldn't conduct electronic discussion in these sorts of ways, when using emoji they should only have arguments over objective facts" that's ... well, it's a stance, but you're at odds with how billions of people communicate electronically. This is why I use terms like "obvious" and "strange".
I doubt this was solely Americans or that Americans are the only group of people that care about race/ethnicity. Maybe your findings are different. Please let me know where to find your publishings.
There are way more ethnicities and races than skin colors. E.g. there are hundreds of distinct ethnicities in Europe that Americans would merrily categorize as "white" based on their obsession with melanin.
Your point: There are more races/ethnicities than skin colors would show exactly why it should be relatively simple to undertake this project: a black person from the US, Congo, or the Dominican Republic could all use the same emoji.
I get that you seem to be here exclusively to dunk on ugly American, but I don't think caring about race is something exclusive to the US. If you're from Europe, remember: we learned it from watching you dad.
Yellow codes for the default, which is whiteness. Or said another way, white skin is the only unracialized skin color. Thus the supposedly neutral yellow stands for it.
I 100% agree. But technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.