5 ms·

Emojis evolved from simple text like ":)" or ":/". And for the new set of emojis, half the time I am not sure what the sentiment is being expressed!

codethief 6y ago
Add to that that, depending on the emoji font, the emoji will look completely different[0]. So as the sender you have no guarantee that the recipient of your message will actually interpret your emoji as you intended. It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sense but I really hate that font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions and how others perceive them. [0]: Sure, ":)" and ":/" also depend on the font but much less. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I'm reminded of a story I heard where someone responded to news of a death in the family with what they took to be a crying face, but what the recipients took to be a crying laughing face.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    Text can have problems with people guessing what things mean from the situation they first see them (where the meaning is not entirely unambiguous). I've seen a similar story of someone thinking "lol" meant "lots of love" and used it to end messages regarding the death of a family member.
    - codethief 6y ago
      The thing is, with emojis the differences introduced by font designers can be very subtle. In the GP's case, the laughing emoji seemed so much out of place and violated social protocol so heavily that I assume the confusion was probably cleared up later on. But what about cases where a font designer changes, say, an emoji face with a light, content smile to a shy smile? This has the chance to undermine the entire emotional content of a message, without sender and recipient ever noticing. For a more concrete example, have a look at https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ . Is it just me who thinks that the glyphs by Apple and WhatsApp show a beaming face with a somewhat sly touch whereas most others simply display happiness?
      - dspillett 6y ago
        The Softbank one looks like someone grinding their teeth in frustration to me.
- uryga 6y ago
  > It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. iirc some japanese character sets already had them (introduced by telecoms for text messaging?), so originally they were included for compatibility [i.e. to fulfill Unicode's goal of being able to encode everything]. then people discovered the emoji keyboard on iphones and it got popular
- bmn__ 6y ago
  > why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. That puts blame on the wrong organisation. The consortium is to the most part only standardising existing character repertoires. Emojis were popularised by a mobile phone equipment manufacturer as a marketing stunt. http://enwp.org/Emoji#History http://enwp.org/Emoji#History
- ajconway 6y ago
  Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means of conveying meaning. > font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    They have a valid point, however. What is now widely considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun. To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a stable definition.
    - ajconway 6y ago
      Words don't have stable definitions either. My point was that there is nothing special about emojis any more than there is about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
      - codethief 6y ago
        Sure, but in the case of words, both sender and recipient at least agree about the content of the message, even if their interpretation is different. In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the recipient's software agree on the message content but the actual persons no longer do because the content is suddenly being displayed very differently.
    - c22 6y ago
      It's fascinating to me that they did this with the pistol, but :knife:, :bomb:, :dagger:, :crossed_swords:, :bow_and_arrow:, et al all look as threatening as ever.
      - frosted-flakes 6y ago
        But those weapons don't have the same highly political negative associations as guns do. Knives are tools more than weapons; bombs can kill a lot of people (see the 2013 Boston Marathon attack or IEDs in Afghanistan), but their typical stylization is also very cartoonish and there isn't an NRA for bombs; swords are archaic and mostly shown as medieval or pirate weapons; and bows and arrows as weapons are also archaic, and they're only used today for hunting.
- gjvnq 6y ago
  They did it for compatibility with Japanese encodings.
dspillett 6y ago
Even back when I started, around the ascendency of the WWW when Usenet was still ABigThing™ (though after the start of the Eternal September, I'm not quite that long in the tooth!) there was already confusion with the simple text smilies. Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy. It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents. As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use). [†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall
bmitc 6y ago
That’s part of the fun of emojis. It’s also a counterpoint to the original post. There is a lot of information in a pictorial emoji, so much so that it can be bent and reimagined to many contexts.
mod 6y ago
Additionally, before emojis, we were saying things like :shrug: in IMs and we conveyed the same thing. It was a specific variation of text, which I still imagine emojis to be. I don't think the shrug emoji is more efficient at conveying sentiment than :shrug:

codethief 6y ago

Add to that that, depending on the emoji font, the emoji will look completely different[0]. So as the sender you have no guarantee that the recipient of your message will actually interpret your emoji as you intended. It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sense but I really hate that font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions and how others perceive them. [0]: Sure, ":)" and ":/" also depend on the font but much less. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409

ALittleLight 6y ago
I'm reminded of a story I heard where someone responded to news of a death in the family with what they took to be a crying face, but what the recipients took to be a crying laughing face.
- dspillett 6y ago
  Text can have problems with people guessing what things mean from the situation they first see them (where the meaning is not entirely unambiguous). I've seen a similar story of someone thinking "lol" meant "lots of love" and used it to end messages regarding the death of a family member.
  - codethief 6y ago
    The thing is, with emojis the differences introduced by font designers can be very subtle. In the GP's case, the laughing emoji seemed so much out of place and violated social protocol so heavily that I assume the confusion was probably cleared up later on. But what about cases where a font designer changes, say, an emoji face with a light, content smile to a shy smile? This has the chance to undermine the entire emotional content of a message, without sender and recipient ever noticing. For a more concrete example, have a look at https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ . Is it just me who thinks that the glyphs by Apple and WhatsApp show a beaming face with a somewhat sly touch whereas most others simply display happiness?
    - dspillett 6y ago
      The Softbank one looks like someone grinding their teeth in frustration to me.
uryga 6y ago
> It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. iirc some japanese character sets already had them (introduced by telecoms for text messaging?), so originally they were included for compatibility [i.e. to fulfill Unicode's goal of being able to encode everything]. then people discovered the emoji keyboard on iphones and it got popular
bmn__ 6y ago
> why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. That puts blame on the wrong organisation. The consortium is to the most part only standardising existing character repertoires. Emojis were popularised by a mobile phone equipment manufacturer as a marketing stunt. http://enwp.org/Emoji#History http://enwp.org/Emoji#History
ajconway 6y ago
Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means of conveying meaning. > font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.
- LocalH 6y ago
  They have a valid point, however. What is now widely considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun. To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a stable definition.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    Words don't have stable definitions either. My point was that there is nothing special about emojis any more than there is about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
    - codethief 6y ago
      Sure, but in the case of words, both sender and recipient at least agree about the content of the message, even if their interpretation is different. In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the recipient's software agree on the message content but the actual persons no longer do because the content is suddenly being displayed very differently.
  - c22 6y ago
    It's fascinating to me that they did this with the pistol, but :knife:, :bomb:, :dagger:, :crossed_swords:, :bow_and_arrow:, et al all look as threatening as ever.
    - frosted-flakes 6y ago
      But those weapons don't have the same highly political negative associations as guns do. Knives are tools more than weapons; bombs can kill a lot of people (see the 2013 Boston Marathon attack or IEDs in Afghanistan), but their typical stylization is also very cartoonish and there isn't an NRA for bombs; swords are archaic and mostly shown as medieval or pirate weapons; and bows and arrows as weapons are also archaic, and they're only used today for hunting.
gjvnq 6y ago
They did it for compatibility with Japanese encodings.

dspillett 6y ago

Even back when I started, around the ascendency of the WWW when Usenet was still ABigThing™ (though after the start of the Eternal September, I'm not quite that long in the tooth!) there was already confusion with the simple text smilies. Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy. It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents. As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use). [†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall

bmitc 6y ago

That’s part of the fun of emojis. It’s also a counterpoint to the original post. There is a lot of information in a pictorial emoji, so much so that it can be bent and reimagined to many contexts.

mod 6y ago

Additionally, before emojis, we were saying things like :shrug: in IMs and we conveyed the same thing. It was a specific variation of text, which I still imagine emojis to be. I don't think the shrug emoji is more efficient at conveying sentiment than :shrug: