Hacker News Reader

In many ways, it is. Take the family emoji. What is that supposed to mean in a sentence? A floating businessman? How would you use that in a conversation? A single eye? A UK royal guard? A mermaid?

Are you able to define what exactly these mean and why we should devote time and effort to ensuring that each one has the correct skin tone and gender representation?

View on HN

I am able to define what those mean, yes. A family means “family” and a mermaid means “mermaid”. Same answer for the rest, none of your emoji examples are complicated to interpret unless you add text to accompany them, and even then, at most you are going to misinterpret their tone, not the specific emoji.

Wether we should devote time making sure they are the correct skin tone is orthogonal to my original comment.

Maybe they all mean different things in different context and the language is evolving to incorporate such items.

Eggplant and the one hundred emoji have well known meanings now that I'm sure the creators were not thinking of when they were designed. I'm sure someone somewhere complained about having vegetables and numbers in the standard at the time though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com