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Unicode is over and it dies over Emoji
- interestingcpp 9y agoIt’s sad they spent the article complaining about emoji rather tham explaining the cryptic claim in the title—obviously, unicode isn’t disappearing in any of our lifetimes. ️️
- pjmlp 9y agoI also don't get the emoji pollution on Unicode, maybe it is an age thing.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe thing to do is to ponder the tremendous consequences if you don't pay any attention to them.
- pjmlp 9y agoNot being able to write meaningless sentences on whatsapp and similar?
- maxerickson 9y agoSee, it'll be alright.
- Oxitendwe 9y agoDo you not realize the downside of having some shady syndicate controlled by rich and powerful people dictate which symbols people are allowed to use to communicate with each other electronically? Or do you realize it and you think it's great, because you expect them to act in your interests, and against those of people you hate?
- SCdF 9y agoIs it intentionally ironic or unintentionally confusing that the first instances that should be ":-)" have actually been converted into the emoji versions?
- username223 9y agoWho knows? Maybe some garbage layer of software turned "colon minus closed paren" into a yellow smiley face. Or maybe the author coded the pictograph.
- avian 9y agoThey look very much like emojis from Wordpress so I would say the former is more likely.
- gweinberg 9y agoPretty clear from context that the author intended it to be ":-)".
- ac29 9y agoEither the author fixed it or your browser is doing it -- they show up as the text versions for me.
- isotopp 9y agoThe author fixed it. That is, TIL that wordpress replaces these things on output, and there is not even a switch to prevent that. I had to install a plugin to fix this.
- bearbearbear 9y agoI actually don't see why graphical emoji need to exist. Isn't :-) sufficient and more efficient in terms of data transfer?
- anotherevan 9y agoThe author has fixed it. There was a wordpress plugin doing that automatically on him (mentioned in the comments on the article).
- mmastrac 9y agoThe original Emoji sort of made sense - there were a number of disparate systems already using the private use area. Now that we're inventing brand new ones that are going to literally live forever the unicode community should seriously consider hoisting them out and forcing carriers and other communication utilities to create proper standards for inline images.
- mikeash 9y agoAh yes, the good ol’ “Everything was fine until black people started complaining they weren’t represented.”
- Oxitendwe 9y agoAre white people any more represented by the color yellow than black people?
- mikeash 9y agoLet me start by saying that I am essentially just paraphrasing the article here: "That Simpsons yellow was read by some as white and non-inclusive, and here is where things start to break down." It doesn't say who the "some" was, so that's an inference on my part. And when you bring the Simpsons into it then, yes, yellow represents white people. That's how the show does it.
- microcolonel 9y agoThe original Unicode emoji made sense as a compatibility measure with Japanese encodings, but I thoroughly disagree with the expansion of Unicode Emoji. The idea that the default emoji represent white people is ridiculous, since the codepoints are meant to translate directly with Japanese computer systems. In the original NTT DoCoMo set, they didn't even have facial skin (probably because of device resolution and colour limitations), just features like eyes and mouths. Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow. In my understanding, nobody in the standardization process even considered that Emoji had a race. If people project one race or another onto what are supposed to be disembodied universal facial expressions, then that's their problem.
- userbinator 9y agoMaybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow. Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese. Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
- bearbearbear 9y agoWhy would you consider yellow to be asian? Asians aren't yellow...
- userbinator 9y agoNeither do white people look pure white, nor are blacks actually black...
- bearbearbear 9y agoTrue, however, Asians aren't even close to yellow.
- PythonicAlpha 9y agoWhen politics come into play, technicians can only shake their heads ...
- stesch 9y agoIt must be politics why this post got flagged. ️
- junkscience2017 9y agoeasy early fix would have been to make all skin tone emojis blue. okay now they represent everyone and no one, no need to introduce ten skin color gradients for each meme
- maxerickson 9y agoThere are (a small number of) people with blue tinted skin. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-reveal-todays-genetic-lesson/story?id=15759819 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-re...
- Klathmon 9y agoFYI that article will start playing a full-volume video ad as you start scrolling down. Scared the shit out of me.
- maxerickson 9y agoSorry, didn't happen to me, I would have found an alternative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates
- Klathmon 9y agoNo knock against you, just wanted to point it out since it was so shocking for me.
- gweinberg 9y agoWhy would blue be any more neutral than yellow?
- ac29 9y agoProbably a cultural carryover from The Simpsons, as mentioned in the article, where the yellow people where generally regarded to be white, as opposed to characters who were clearly black, asian, or other races.
- FreakyT 9y agoI definitely agree that the over-specialization of emoji faces is ridiculous. However, one question has occurred to me: what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use? The answer, in my experience, is that essentially no one uses skin-tone-modified emoji at all. This, in turn, makes me wonder if perhaps this was the intended result the whole time—to, in a very circuitous way, ensure that the "default" state of any given emoji has a generic skin tone.
- porfirium 9y agoI am white. Me and my friends use black emojis ironically and "Simpsons"-yellow emojis when we really mean them.
- always_good 9y ago> what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use? The blog post gave some good examples. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-people-dont-use-white-emoji/481695/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-p... http://www.businessinsider.com/kendall-jenner-used-darker-emoji-than-her-skin-tone-2017-8?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/kendall-jenner-used-darker-em... I don't think white people use white emoji because being white isn't part of their self-identity. That's one of the normalizing qualities of being the dominant type (e.g. Hollywood). Just like nobody points out that they are heterosexual. I live in Mexico and my darker skinner friends use the color tinted emojis.
- derefr 9y agoNow I’m curious whether white minorities in cultures (e.g. in Hong Kong) are more likely to use the modifier.
- achilleas 9y ago> However, one question has occurred to me: what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use? And how do these consequences lead to Unicode being over/dead as the post title suggests?
- porfirium 9y agoThat's not what the Skyrim face editor looks like. That game is heavily modded. The real one is more like this: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/interactive-storytelling-narrative-techniques-and-methods-in-video-games/media/2.1%20-%20Skyrim%20Character%20Creation.jpg http://scalar.usc.edu/works/interactive-storytelling-narrati...
- Frondo 9y agoI welcome adding Emoji to Unicode. I also welcome adding different skin tones to Unicode. I welcome everything that invites more people to engage with, appreciate, and feel included by technology. I welcome a world where you don't need to be at all tech-savvy to get as much out of a computer as anyone else. People can drive without being engine-savvy, and I think it is fan-fucking-fastic that computing is moving in the same way. Technology is such an amplifier for human activity, if everyone doesn't get to play, we're doing it wrong. Any time anyone writes "this new thing that makes a system less elegant but opens it up to more people is a bad new thing" -- they are doing it wrong.
- derefr 9y agoMy understanding of the Emoji acceptance process is that such characters only get accepted if you can prove that people have been using the emoji as a text-like glyph in other contexts (usually either on paper, or in a proprietary forum/chat system.) Unicode’s aim isn’t to serve as a useful “palette” of characters that people should actually want to type ever. It’s to serve as a single, unified encoding for archiving existing texts. If people persistently write the same odd symbol on paper, then Unicode aims to ensure that they’ll have a common codepoint to encode that symbol to. The worst case scenario for Unicode is a world where people encode texts onto forums with millions of little proprietary Emoji images, and then those sites close, the images are lost, the URLs of the images are just UUID.png or somesuch, and so the contextual meaning of the text is lost. The second-worst-case is one where such texts blanket the internet, and—because of their various derivative-proprietary encodings—it becomes impossible to make such texts machine-readable/indexable/sentiment-analyzable/etc. The Unicode Standards Body might be behaving rather silly from the perspective of someone who just wants to be able to record their own thoughts—but from the perspective of ensure the Internet and all its documents remain amenable to library science, the standards body is behaving perfectly sensibly. They’ll give people whatever they need to keep using Unicode in place of some proprietary extension, because that’s how you keep text on computers interchangeable.
- bearbearbear 9y agoI don't understand why you need different colors of emoji. Isn't yellow sufficiently neutral?
- stesch 9y agoWhy is this flagged??
- gkya 9y agoEmoji fanboys I guess... I seem to not be able to vouch for it. Is it a karma thing or can't one vouch for submissions?
- stesch 9y agoI have the feeling it's something American that I can't really understand as an European. Last time I got flagged was a comment with a link to a picture of a Sikh with a sign that said he writes bug free code. As some Americans mistake Sikhs with Muslims that may have triggered something. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14209714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14209714 By the way: You can't post emojis here. Hacker News removes them from your comments.
- BLanen 9y agoLeast important issue ever. Unicode has like a billion more spaces for characters.