I'm okay with smileys, but Unicode wasn't the right standard to deal with it. Unicode maybe wasn't the right standard to deal with anything.

At least nothing is wiggling. Of those Unicode points which are graphical, at least all of them can still be printed on paper and won't require a screen. I wonder how long that invariant lasts.

It's classic scope creep resulting in unmanageable bloat.

I enjoy putting emojis in folder names on my computer for easier visual identification.

Also, in passwords on websites to keep developers on their toes.

Google/Apple needed it to fill the moat for Japanese phone market - for Google it was because Japanese carriers were stripping emoji from outgoing emails, and for Apple it was because iPhone as a real phone and not an Internet-connected pocket PC with voice call had to support the SoftBank emoji set.

And yeah, :slack-style-emoji-notation: is superior. It was just a historical necessity for Google/Apple.

Personally, I'm all for it. It's been an incredibly effective way of urging developers to support newer Unicode standards.

Personally I think the whole emoji thing is a triumph of Unicode. Being able to convey more subtext through emoji makes communication so much easier especially across language boundaries.