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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is because emojis are created by committee. The Unicode committee to be precise.

If instead emojis could be drawn and inserted in messages and maintained and shared through emoji-libraries by actual users, then we would get an actual naturally evolving language. Much more interesting.

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As a classic example of a naturally evolved emoticon language, on the SomethingAwful forums anyone could (and still can) buy an emoticon for $30. Here they all are: https://forums.somethingawful.com/misc.php?action=showsmilie...

Surprised there are so few.

Conditions for buying one for $30 are here:

https://store.somethingawful.com/products/smilie.php

Many many hilarious but inappropriate smilies have died as part of the SomethingAwful revamp. I'm still not clicking on that link at work...

I should confess that I absolutely added :ohdear: :colbert: :v: :argh: :welp: and a fair few others to Slack at work.

:shobon:

That's probably also why we don't have a real gun emoji (or it's rendered as a water pistol in many places). Although guns aren't the nicest invention, they are real and sometimes need to be represented graphically.

The pistol emoji originally looked like a real gun. I think only Windows had a fake looking gun (more of a ray gun than a water pistol) initially.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150625033351/https://unicode.o...

The change to a water pistol started with Apple in 2016, and then other companies followed:

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/

This was so important for (american) vendors and the (more or less american) committee that they even retroactively changed the standard from "pistol" to "water pistol", in the light of (american) gun violence.

Msn messenger had custom emoticons in 2003. Me and my friends had our own little vernacular of custom emojis. And then microsoft forced everyone onto skype. I keep being amazed how chat hasn’t really improved in decades, only churned.

It is nothing short of a disgrace that we can't even personalize the fonts in whatsapp and similar clients.

Right, I have a hard time believing that a emoji for e.g. "love hotel" would be able to become a emoji nowadays, if it had not been grandfathered in.

It's possible in Slack. Every Slack workspace has its set of own emoji. Some of them are unique, some are almost universal.

party parrot might be the most common across the Slacks I've been into

Is it even a real company if they don't have the party parrot?

On Telegram, one can make one’s own sticker packs by simply uploading a bunch of images. I see a lot of sticker packs on the theme of “my fursona expressing various emotions”, and it is pretty common to see one person have a new idea for an emotion or interaction, which is rapidly copied into other people’s sets when they have the resources available to create or commission a new drawing.

Furries being furries, a lot of these are pretty explicit, and pretty inventive in their explicitness.

Yup! In fact, getting more stickers has been on my list for a while now.

They're used for everything, but they both: * Capture an emotion with more granularity than available emojis * Capture an intended physical action whether sfw or nsfw (owo) * Invoke everything that comes with seeing your character "come to life" as well as assisting you in embodying that character (like a fursuit does)

This is one of the most important features of telegram; without it, the furries wouldn't have become the core userbase during the early years.

... or programs could just display images instead of continuously approximating them (which is why unicode is so bloated and unreasonable about)

This is literally Telegram stickers.

Are these stickers inline? It's not a language if you can't make a sentence.

Are glyphs going from left to right the general rule now? It's not a language otherwise? Pretty sure there are a tonne of pre-Western languages that buck this trend.

People tend to use stickers in amongst regular text in a way that's more "I could write out how I feel/what I'm going to do to you/what you're going to do to me, but instead I will _show_ you".

Take the regular language in between stickers as the grammar/conjunctions as conjunctions are to regular language.

No, they are not. But almost no one uses emoji to compose sentences anyway.

I've noticed that emoji and stickers are absolutely not used in the same way.

People often combine multiple emoji to express certain things that can't be expressed with a single emoji (and too difficult to find/create a sticker for).

Stickers are also much less subtle and more in your face, and therefore not appreciated in the same way.

although i’ve noticed mostly human emojis can be used consciously. the others (tree, objects, etc) are suggested when you type a word but almost never selected to replace words in a sentence. So i don’t know who really uses them.

Not full sentences perhaps but there is a reason the Egyptians used hieroglyphics, and a reason we say a picture is worth a thousand words, so adding some to a text message is very common

I had to make my girlfriend stop doing that because I couldn't decipher what she was saying, it was like +30% extra information I thought was decoration :D

Also, on Tinder bios emoji soup is a thing.

Almost no one, besides some country with the biggest population on earth. ;-)

Btw:

http://www.emojidick.com/

Most messengers have these stickers too

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