5 ms·

Why is there such a rule?

colejohnson66 6y ago
Emojis aren’t professional (depending on who you ask) and can be overused (look at a few popular GitHub projects’ READMEs - emojis on every bullet point of the feature list, for example)
- tester34 6y ago
  I agree that they aren't the most professional thing to use, but I'm not sure why I agree Maybe it's some kind of bias?
- fhifjfhjjjk 6y ago
  emojis aren't "professional" is your reasoning? is it 1987? should women also wear their skirts below the knee?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    I didn’t say that they weren’t. I’m simply saying that some do think that. Whether I do or don’t is irrelevant as I’m only speculating on the reason why.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  What a weird reasoning. In most contexts I've seen, "professionalism" doesn't really do anything except strip away all the human factor that goes into every interaction. Personally, I don't care whether the person I'm talking to is being "professional" or not. What I care is that they're respectful and can properly communicate their thoughts. With that mindset, emojis (and emoticon) can actually add context to interactions, considering how much context is lost when communicating over text. A simple smiley face at the end of a sentence can go a long way in my experience :)
at_a_remove 6y ago
Also, looking at the article, they are quite complex! It looks like handling emojis in a proper manner has a large investment and the payoff is somewhat small.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Emoji don't introduce anything that isn't used for various other languages. Emojis are just the most visible breakage for American users when you screw up your unicode handling. HN however handles all of unicode just fine, it just chose to specifically exclude emojis (and a bunch of other symbols)
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    I think emoji is wonderful for widespread unicode support. It combats ossification. It is also a nice carrot to incite users to install updates. However, I don't like the rabbit hole it started to go into with gendered and colored emojis. There's never going to be enough. I wish we had stuck to color-neutral and gender-neutral, like original smileys :) I find it also conveys too much meaning. I am generally not interested in knowing a person's gender or ethnic group when discussing over text... but I digress.
    - samatman 6y ago
      I've said this before, but not here: Eventually, Unicode will allow you to combine flag modifiers with human emojis. So you can have a black South Korean man facepalming. This will trigger a war which ends industrial civilization, and is the leading candidate for the Great Filter.
- Someone 6y ago
  For HN I would think almost all the complexity is in rendering. That’s a job for your browser. What’s left is things like the max length for a title (not too problematic to count that in code points or bytes, I think) The big risk, I think, is in users (mis)using rendering direction, multiple levels of accents, zero-width characters and weird code points to mess up the resulting page. Some Unicode symbols and emojis typically look a lot larger and heavier than ‘normal’ characters, switching writing direction may change visual indentation of a comment, etc. Worse, Unicode rendering being hard, text rendering bugs that crash browsers or even entire devices are discovered every now and then. If somebody entered one in a HN message, that could crash millions of devices.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Surprisingly many people try to abuse Unicode when posting submissions and comments. This includes not just emojis, but also other symbols, or glyphs that look like bold, underlined or otherwise stylized letters.
- criddell 6y ago
  𝕴 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖐 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖞'𝖛𝖊 𝖇𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖑𝖞.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    HN's character stripping is completely arbitrary. You can play mahjong, domino or cards (🀕, 🁓, 🃅) but not chess, you can show some random glyphs like ⏱ or ⤪ but not others, you can use box-drawing characters (┐) but not block elements, you can use byzantine musical notation (𝈙) but only western musical symbols (𝅗𝅥) and the notes are banned, you can Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ just fine.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > Surprisingly many people try to abuse Unicode when posting submissions and comments. ˙ǝsnqɐ ƃuıpıoʌɐ ʇɐ qoɾ pooƃ ɐ ɥɔns sǝop sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɟo ɥɔunq ɐ ƃuıuuɐq ʎʃıɹɐɹʇıqɹɐ ǝsnɐɔǝ𐐒
pessimizer 6y ago
This is a forum sponsored by opinionated people who find them annoying. I find them annoying, too, so I think it's a good convention. Somehow ":)" became an industry, and as industries go, then eliminated ":)" (which gets replaced with a smiling yellow head in most places.) It isn't the only arbitrary convention enforced here, and the sum of those conventions are what attracts the audience.
saagarjha 6y ago
Emoji draw attention to themselves in a way that plain text does not. I assume this is why Hacker News does not allow bolding text and strongly discourages use of ALL CAPS.

Emojis aren’t professional (depending on who you ask) and can be overused (look at a few popular GitHub projects’ READMEs - emojis on every bullet point of the feature list, for example)

tester34 6y ago
I agree that they aren't the most professional thing to use, but I'm not sure why I agree Maybe it's some kind of bias?
fhifjfhjjjk 6y ago
emojis aren't "professional" is your reasoning? is it 1987? should women also wear their skirts below the knee?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I didn’t say that they weren’t. I’m simply saying that some do think that. Whether I do or don’t is irrelevant as I’m only speculating on the reason why.
Kaze404 6y ago
What a weird reasoning. In most contexts I've seen, "professionalism" doesn't really do anything except strip away all the human factor that goes into every interaction. Personally, I don't care whether the person I'm talking to is being "professional" or not. What I care is that they're respectful and can properly communicate their thoughts. With that mindset, emojis (and emoticon) can actually add context to interactions, considering how much context is lost when communicating over text. A simple smiley face at the end of a sentence can go a long way in my experience :)

at_a_remove 6y ago

Also, looking at the article, they are quite complex! It looks like handling emojis in a proper manner has a large investment and the payoff is somewhat small.

wongarsu 6y ago
Emoji don't introduce anything that isn't used for various other languages. Emojis are just the most visible breakage for American users when you screw up your unicode handling. HN however handles all of unicode just fine, it just chose to specifically exclude emojis (and a bunch of other symbols)
- MayeulC 6y ago
  I think emoji is wonderful for widespread unicode support. It combats ossification. It is also a nice carrot to incite users to install updates. However, I don't like the rabbit hole it started to go into with gendered and colored emojis. There's never going to be enough. I wish we had stuck to color-neutral and gender-neutral, like original smileys :) I find it also conveys too much meaning. I am generally not interested in knowing a person's gender or ethnic group when discussing over text... but I digress.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I've said this before, but not here: Eventually, Unicode will allow you to combine flag modifiers with human emojis. So you can have a black South Korean man facepalming. This will trigger a war which ends industrial civilization, and is the leading candidate for the Great Filter.
Someone 6y ago
For HN I would think almost all the complexity is in rendering. That’s a job for your browser. What’s left is things like the max length for a title (not too problematic to count that in code points or bytes, I think) The big risk, I think, is in users (mis)using rendering direction, multiple levels of accents, zero-width characters and weird code points to mess up the resulting page. Some Unicode symbols and emojis typically look a lot larger and heavier than ‘normal’ characters, switching writing direction may change visual indentation of a comment, etc. Worse, Unicode rendering being hard, text rendering bugs that crash browsers or even entire devices are discovered every now and then. If somebody entered one in a HN message, that could crash millions of devices.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Surprisingly many people try to abuse Unicode when posting submissions and comments. This includes not just emojis, but also other symbols, or glyphs that look like bold, underlined or otherwise stylized letters.

criddell 6y ago
𝕴 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖐 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖞'𝖛𝖊 𝖇𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖑𝖞.
- masklinn 6y ago
  HN's character stripping is completely arbitrary. You can play mahjong, domino or cards (🀕, 🁓, 🃅) but not chess, you can show some random glyphs like ⏱ or ⤪ but not others, you can use box-drawing characters (┐) but not block elements, you can use byzantine musical notation (𝈙) but only western musical symbols (𝅗𝅥) and the notes are banned, you can Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ just fine.
masklinn 6y ago
> Surprisingly many people try to abuse Unicode when posting submissions and comments. ˙ǝsnqɐ ƃuıpıoʌɐ ʇɐ qoɾ pooƃ ɐ ɥɔns sǝop sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɟo ɥɔunq ɐ ƃuıuuɐq ʎʃıɹɐɹʇıqɹɐ ǝsnɐɔǝ𐐒

pessimizer 6y ago

This is a forum sponsored by opinionated people who find them annoying. I find them annoying, too, so I think it's a good convention. Somehow ":)" became an industry, and as industries go, then eliminated ":)" (which gets replaced with a smiling yellow head in most places.) It isn't the only arbitrary convention enforced here, and the sum of those conventions are what attracts the audience.

saagarjha 6y ago

Emoji draw attention to themselves in a way that plain text does not. I assume this is why Hacker News does not allow bolding text and strongly discourages use of ALL CAPS.