Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

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I tend to find people who don't like emoji to be slightly racist. Given emoji started in Japan, they get this "ewww, who wants the foreign shit in my text". Even HN is slightly racist on this front. The fact that an entire culture embraced them and that you reject them is not racism with a capital R but is arguably in the gray area of, probably unintended, micro aggressions. You're basically telling an entire culture to go F themselves.

If you don't like racism tag, then how about sexism. I'm pretty confident women use more emoji than men and I've seen plenty of female engineer's tech blog posts showing lots of emoji in their terminal prompts etc. So, assuming I'm correct, not supporting them is arguably sexist since you're effectively telling women "sorry, your preferred mode of expressing yourself is disallowed."

I get that the blog post is about not using them personally and that's of course 100% fine. But if you're judging people on if they use them or not, or if you're making systems that don't support them, please reconsider.

Wow, this is such a wrong way of interpreting the way things are, that you're finding offense where none was probably intended.

Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British.

There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys).

I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.

Why is it ok on HN to write "That's funny lol" but not ok to write "That's funny :emoji-for-laugh:". Sure I get that no offense is intended but if twice as many women prefer the second form over the first then HN is unintentionally preferring male communication over female communication.

It's not like it would be hard for HN to enable support. In fact they're intentionally disallowing it. I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm just pointing out that the results happen to affect women more than men

We're talking about peppering one's writing with brightly colored little pictures. If a dislike of that is anything, it's ageist: I don't want the way I write to give people the impression that I'm a ten year old.

This is a pretty big leap to be honest - and this argument can be made for nearly anything if you look for it.

For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.

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