Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

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I will never understand why emoji, the whole point of which is to convey universal emotions (and other icons), ever needed skin tone modifiers at all. why do "thumbs up" and "thumbs up, but i'm white btw" need to be encoded differently? why is everyone OK with Native Americans and other ethnicities with reddish skin tones being excluded? just a complete mess top-to-bottom, and now we can basically never undo it.

imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.

Because people didn't understand that emoji was supposed to represent concepts, and saw them as small illustrations instead. That's also why Apple's version is basically the de facto standard now, and Google and Microsoft has had to adjust theirs to look more like Apple's to minimize confusion when the small pictograms doesn't look the same for sender and receiver.

People like customising these things to be mini-avatars as a form of self expression. I don’t see a reason to get upset about this option existing — not even from the perspective of “oh no strings are even weirder, I can’t safely treat them as a stream of bytes all the time”, given that combining characters are needed for other stuff anyway.

(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).

>(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).

because why would we add further bloat and implementation complexity to something that is already bloated and complex to implement?

You believe that’s a reason to think it can’t be done?

not at all, of course. realistically the biggest impediment to adding more skin tones is that if the list of additional skin tones wasn't completely exhaustive, there would be public outcry. as it stands right now, the simple gradient scale is "good enough," so there isn't much impetus to add any more.

> if the list of additional skin tones wasn't completely exhaustive, there would be public outcry

This is kind of how I felt when looking at the scale just now, because none of the 10 really look like me. Maybe it's supposed to be a round-down/up sort of thing, or maybe I should calibrate my display?

The default was yellow which basically represents white people.

Maybe in an advanced stage of liver failure. It's really stretching to say yellow == white. The default color made nobody happy, which is exactly why it was the right solution to the problem.

There's a good history of it in Lego here [0]. You can see its a complex relationship but yellow has been used for caucasians (and asians) and has always had a difficult relationship for people of color.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...

actually the excessive yellowness brillantly avoided the uncanny valley of half-baked underspecified realism

I mean, sortof, I guess, maybe.

Given the history, one could make an argument that they represent Asians rather than Caucasians (it's always seemed odd to me that we ended up with this name for white(r) people, but such is life).

white skinned people should be called beige skinned people. Only albinos could pretend to whitehish-ness and still they are mostly not, because even if their skin maximally reflect light, they are still made of blood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism_in_humans BTW humans can become easily become black in a continuous like manner https://alchetron.com/cdn/melanotan-ii-d26dbedd-94fb-434a-8d... extreme: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3198931/Reddit-user...

It's a very nice technology and is an example of permanent whole body genetic mutation via epigenetics.The issue is that it is irreversible.. The converse, a whitening substance does not exist yet but could exist in theory, by antagonizing the melanin receptors.

this is the most insane recurring argument and I'll never understand it. sure that's how The Simpsons works, but that's not how LEGO works, so that argument gets canceled out. then you look at the yellow smiley face iconography that I'm sure has cultural roots somewhere but was universally used to specifically express universality—back when WAL*MART used it as their logo, were they specifically trying to market to white people, at the exclusion of all others??

then you take the history of emoji into account and you see that that doesn't really work as an explanation at all. it's like you (and everyone else who makes this inane argument) are trying to make something that's not white-people-centric, white-people-centric, just so you can complain about it being white-people-centric.

> that's not how LEGO works

It is how Lego originated. See discussion at [0]. Early on they had a limited palette and would use yellow for caucasians and asians and at times used black for POC and red for native americans. The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited - and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...

> The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited

1978-2003 is hardly a limited timespan in the history of LEGO!

> and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.

right, because this is when they decided to make minifigs look like real people, instead of imaginary, race-neutral-ish, yellow people, once they got into licensing the appearance of real people for their minifigs!

The default was yellow which basically represents white people.

I guess you missed the day Yellow Peril was covered in history class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril

Really? The default was yellow because that's what Franklin Loufrani used back in the 1970s in France, and he's (probably) the one responsible for the smiley becoming a global icon. Did he intend yellow to mean white people? I'm highly skeptical, but I'd be open to listening if you have some documentation...

You're being downvoted but you're kinda right.

The longest running cartoon show in history (The Simpsons) uses yellow to represent white people, while POC are brown and black.

in racists terms, yellow has always denoted asian people (which is weird btw), simpsons are a coincidence

It doesn't matter if the decision was intentional or coincidence, the fact remains the most popular TV cartoon in history has trained our expectations.

race-neutral smiley faces and LEGO minifigs predate The Simpsons—you're just taking your personal experience and projecting it onto everyone else.

Sure, but Lego didn't have brown and black for POC. The training of expectations isn't exclusive, and more people consumed The Simpsons than Legos.

It can and should be undone. There is a difference between the identifier and the representation, android should render color skinned emojis in their yellow equivalent, as simple as that.

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