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Comment by tills13 | Hacker News Reader

Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.

Twitter barely changes -> why do they have so many employees if they barely do anything. 80% get fired -> this is the end of twitter. Employee changes emoji -> why are they making such unimportant changes.

Whatever happens at twitter, someone on the internet will complain about it.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

What crown?

I think they sold it when they downsized.

It was actually one of their employees reading a tweet about it and then just implementing it within an hour or two. The person was shocked at the autonomy X employees have.

Couldn't you have made the same argument against changing it in the first place?

And changing is back is significantly easier. You don't have to design it, get review etc.

No because the reason it was changed is actually Apple's fault. They switched to a water pistol but because you can transmit an emoji cross platform, what may be perceived as a innocent message using the water pistol emoji could come across as a negative message when that water pistol is rendered as a gun in the receiver's phone.

Scroll down in this page for the example I am citing:

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

This really raises an interesting attack vector. Get influential enough at Apple -> push a change that could cause trouble for others given you are the largest entity -> they will be forced to adopt your change.

This should have been picked up by congress because it is some small group (or even one person) affecting the decisions of the entire industry.

Also its pretty fitting that Musk has applied his signature move: Make the change damn the consequences and then re-learn the reason why it was done in the first place when some disaster occurs. It must be nice that he never has to deal with the consequences of his actions.

You can work on little things and big things at the same time.

My thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).

lmao you really think this took me more than 15 minutes to do?

Based on the number of bugs and difficulty X had doing anything in the first months after Elon come over, yes.

Sounds like you've got so much to do

I do! And we're hiring! x.com/jobs

This is the funniest comment you've ever written on this website. Glad you've got time to engage with us during your busy day!

Still 15 minutes fixing something that wasn't broken instead of generating revenue or cutting costs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit - and another 10 defending the decision on HackerNews forums

A strange concern. All those superfluous hours wasted at a private company? Those billionaires will be fine without someone defending their money.

Oh and wait until you hear about the Google Doodle...

It would certainly be strange if I were concerned.

at least 25 seems reasonable, no?

Can you fix the sign-in loop next?

yes

Can you do it in 15 minutes please?

unfortunately that one requires considerably more care

What makes you think their “focus” is on emojis? This is probably just one among many things they’re doing. And it’s the right thing to do, because the political censorship of the pistol emoji is yet another example of how deeply biased tech companies have been in pushing their politics onto customers.

There's zero cost to leaving the emoji as it is. The designer of the new version claims he's still working on it, so I don't know how you can say it's not a "focus". It's a waste of time and money for purely ideological reasons.

The change to the water gun was for ideological reasons. This is returning to the original.

Without being the project manager, you're speculating on the amount of focus this had.

It's not a git revert. It is active effort to create a new emoji. There's zero cost to leaving it alone, there's material cost to changing it. Last time I checked, that's a bad way for a company that nearly went out of business to prioritize.

Well, I guess we'll just see how it pays off for them.

It's already making buzz so if it was an hour of work, I'd say the marketing effect alone was worth it.

Oh you're right, the pixels of an emoji are really going to be what reverses Twitter's loss of advertisers and active user counts

Noone is saying that.

I'm simply saying you're talking about Twitter right now because of it, and it was a small change.

You know it was if you're an engineer, let's not play dumb.

Not sure why everything relating to X has to be so hostile.

The original change was for ideological reasons and this change is for ideological reasons too. Both are same stupid waste of time.

If you think the first change was stupid, why would you support keeping it?

Ideological.

All the people arguing both sides of this, then and now, are motivated by ideology. That includes the parent post you replied to, me, you, Elon, etc.

People often argue over cultural changes. And then there's politics on top of that. And in Elon's case perhaps publicity, also.

Because it's the change that's stupid.

Funny. You could make the same argument about the change to water gun.

The gun emoji is used to make death threats etcetera. Why do you want that on a social media platform? It's not politics, it's just decency.

Right, because changing it to a "water gun" fixes that problem

Yes. Try making a death threat with a water gun

Or... you know... /words/...

The amount of jokes, memes, and legitimate threats I've seen with the "water gun" emoji far outnumber the number of people using it to represent an actual water gun.

In fact, I can't recall a single time I've seen it used in the context of water guns.

People posting "<Skull><Water_Droplets><Water_Gun>" on Twitter/TikTok/whatever are just doing the emoji equivalent of saying "I'm gonna shoot this guy, in Minecraft."

Is it really better that the emoji is technically not an actual pistol? Is that gonna be the thing that stops people from making threats online?

Everybody knows that death threats were invented with emoji.

The press this generated probably makes it one of the most impactful things someone can do with their 15 minutes of idle time

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