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Comment by veltas | Hacker News Reader

Reading about how they have carefully designed the pictures to prevent people from communicating certain things, it reminds me of the language in Orwell's 1984 which was a simplistic and limited language designed to make it impossible to dissent.

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The important difference is that newspeak was designed to replace language whereas emojis supplement it.

There are plenty of emojis that can be used to express dissent, skepticism or even out right anger.

And as a general advantage emoji isn't trying to replace words. Nobody is (as far as I know) required to use emoji. People can pick and choose when they want them.

The point is that it's a political choice to give people the ability to communicate through emojis while removing it from others (e.g. the gun example).

Weren't Unicode emojis designed to replace image emoticons?

OTOH its a dictionary of ideograms that gets extended every year in a fairly democratic way: anyone can suggest or propose an emoji, which is quite different than the English Oxford Dictionary.

have you considered that emojis are a lot of fun and can add to your "voice"?

What did I say? I was just saying they literally tried to prevent you from saying specific things with the designs of the icons, and made the connection. I didn't say they weren't fun.

Have you considered that "fun" and "communication" are two different words and neither of them is in any way dependent on the other?

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