Hacker News Reader

Comment by xcf_seetan | Hacker News Reader

As someone that used the original emotes, all this graphics emojis just don't make any sense. There are just too many, and i have to lookup what they mean in isolation and try to dig what they mean in sequence... I dont have the context the user had when he constructed the sequence of emojis and i cant understand what they are trying to communicate, at this point it is easier to just say the words.

View on HN

The collection is so large and some images feel like have no purpose of use in casual conversations. Few times I've seen statements saying that emojis can and do help communicating with foreigners when text fails - as these add needed context. But if you do dig around figuring out how to pass thought in little images, you can use translation software instead, which nowadays is really good.

Some 20 years ago a ICQ-like instant messenger in Poland called Gadu-Gadu has become the default way of communication on the Internet for us here. GG had own set of emoticons but only few of really big set were in constant use [1; set for KDE's Koperte but it was same on Windows native client]. I doubt that anything have changed and emoji are being treated in same way: a small set is used and rest is largely skipped.

There was this little thing about GG's emoticon that when you typed "??" and "!!" application would turn these into looped gifs. People were so accustomed to that effect they were doing double punctuation elsewhere on the Internet and even in real life.

[1] - https://store.kde.org/p/1002190/

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ <- let's see you encode that, unicode.

Unicode seems to encode it just fine

I just see a flipped table. That means the decoder gave up.

There are too many, and there are a ridiculous number of variants. Why do we need options for the skin colour of an emoji? How on earth does it change the meaning of a smiley or a face palm? Faces with different hair colours too! Clocks with hands at different times?

Which skin color should all emoji be?

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066...

Original bright yellow was a good candidate, since actually no one looks like this.

Why should skin colour be specified at all? Why not leave it as an implementation detail? Yellow is the popular default choice, but it could very well be green, blue, pink, or anything really.

why not let people just pick which one they want to use

I guess they could just support custom colours, but that seems like a needless complication—much like skin tones themselves.

Just use a font with the colours you like?

Why are the Simpsons yellow, yet the black guy in the show is black?

There's no "neutral" rather its just "white without specifying it"

Why should the Simpsons hold any relevance to emoji?

That is your perception. What is neutral is cultural, maybe personal.

I grew up in two multi-cultural places so do not have the same default perceptions.

This map doesn't seem accurate.

Indigenous is a tricky concept in many place. Can you tell me who that map defines as the indigenous people of the following places:

England

Japan

Turkey

Sri Lanka

South Africa

I mean this genuinely, are you on the spectrum? My friends and I use emojis all the time and I've never been confused by what they mean.

Do you ever use them cross-generationally? I had a friend a dozen years my junior stop talking to me because I used a winking face when I wanted to make it clear I was kidding and he thought I was flirting with him. Never mind that we'd been friends for years and there had never, ever been a hint of interest between us. He insisted I should have known that's what it "always" means, never mind that I was using emoticons in AIM when he was in diapers.

I'm not friends with any zoomers but I generally use sticking tongue out when I'm being cheeky.

This wasn't cheeky so much as self-deprecating enough that it was important to clarify I didn't actually mean it seriously. It would've sounded pretty dark otherwise.

This doesn't feel much different than words. There was a whole ordeal at Microsoft when an intern said an event was going to be "lit" and a bunch of older generation folk assumed that meant drugs.

Language changes all the time, emoji are just part of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com