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The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think
- qwerty456127 6y agoIMHO adding different skin tones to emojis is racism, just like if we added multiple skin tones to letters and everybody was only allowed to use their own. And this also introduces unnecessary complexity and clutters the screen space. Is a field to set your skin color in the app/browser/OS settings so the proper handshake emoji would be chosen automatically according to that and that of the counterpart the next thing to come?
- realusername 6y agoI do agree with that, adding skin colors was at best of very poor taste, additional unnecessary information nobody needed, emojis already being the most universal concept you can get. If you really want to look them different, add a system-wide setting to change all of them, I personally would like to remove them all.
- grenoire 6y agoThat's basically what you already do with quite a few apps. Discord have a total override on the default skin colour, for one.
- gundmc 6y agoI don't think it's racist, but I do find it a little odd when someone takes the time to purposefully select a non-default skin tone. As a white person, it feels weird to go out of my way to send a white emoji and feels even weirder to use a black or brown emoji. I'm all for inclusion, but it's not like anyone's skin is the yellow color of the default faces.
- avhception 6y agoIt's even weirder with some apps that seem to default on the black or brown emojis instead of the yellow ones. I guess they try to be extra-inclusive, BLM and all that? Dunno, but as a white person I sent the "wrong" skin color by accident multiple times and kept wondering what this actually means. Am I appropriating a skin color? Am I being extra inclusive? I just wish we would have kept real skin colors out of the emojis.
- iainmerrick 6y agoI'm all for inclusion, but it's not like anyone's skin is the yellow color of the default faces. Instinctively I agree with you, but: does that yellow color remind you of the Simpsons? On that show, the white people are yellow but the brown people are brown. The yellow isn’t really neutral.
- niceairport 6y agoAh yes, the Simpsons, the source of truth for all things life.
- 1337shadow 6y agoExactly why I want Cyan, but it's not available, I feel excluded, apparently the community needs to be more inclusive to people who want to identify with Cyan colored emojis.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoJokes aside, the programmer in me wonders why there are individual skin tone code points in the first place, instead of generic (colorless) "skin tone modifier", which would then be followed by a color codepoint from a palette of named colors, say 256 of those. So I'd write: Rightward Hand + Generic Skin Tone + Green, ZJW, Leftward Hand + Generic Skin Tone + Blue, to express a handshake between an Orion and an Andorian. Or, if 256 colors are not enough, you could write a combination of RGBA Color Modifier + eight characters in [0-9A-Fa-F] range... This would also help with hair colors and bunch of other stuff that has separate code points at the moment. I have a feeling we'll end up with an approximation of this at some point, maybe a decade from now.
- throwaway210222 6y ago> On [the Simpsons], the white people are yellow but the brown people are brown. To be fair, the asians are yellow in the Simpsons :) [1]. [1] https://tokyofox.net/2015/02/13/japan-related-references-in-the-simpsons/ https://tokyofox.net/2015/02/13/japan-related-references-in-... I'm truly disappointed the woke haven't pursued this.
- sildur 6y agoI see it like customizing player aspect in video games.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago> I'm all for inclusion, but it's not like anyone's skin is the yellow color of the default faces. Have you ever noticed how in The Simpsons all the “white” characters have an unrealistic skin tone in a primary color as well as often unrealistic hair textures and colors but all the other races have realistic skin tones and hair textures and colors for their races? There's also a rather interesting cultural difference in this. U.S.A. viewers often wonder why Japanese cartoon characters look what they consider “white”, whereas Japanese viewers consider them what they consider “yellow”. The lesson to be learned from this is that a not insignificant number, perhaps majority, of viewers replaces “nonrealism” with what it considers to be the default, unmarked expectation of the world. For U.S.A.-men, that is “white”, for Japanmen, that is “yellow”. It doesn't so much seem to be one's own “race” but the “race” one most frequently encounters in life, as U.S.A.-men of all “races” seem to do so. The end result is that for many, the amber skin tone is not true neutral territory, even though objectively speaking it is, for they perceive it as replaceable with whatever race is the most frequent in their milieu. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ek5MqILXIAEdC3k.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ek5MqILXIAEdC3k.jpg This image is most interesting and ironic to me. The auctor of said image seems to strongly imply that the stick figures that has the same color as the background are “white”, but it is not even clear whether they are transparent or simply the same, unnatural color as the background, whereas the other characters have a realistic, plausible human skin tone rather than a primary color such as perfect black. The “white” characters are not a realistic hue of beige, for instance. — I find such to have an interesting influence on the discussion, in that I often see that some people seem to perceive fictional characters that are raceless, due to for instance being of alien origin, to essentially have the “race” they consider the unmarked default of their milieu. In particular, I had a discussion once where there was complaint about “changing the race” of the character of Tyrael. This character is a angel, who like all angels in that universe is faceless, nothing of his body but a vague humanoid shape clad in full body armor was ever shown, but when he was given human form, he had to be given such human features as a gender and a race, so they choose a “black adult male”, and some complaint that his “race was changed”; it seems to me that the character that had no race, age, or gender was consider a “white adult male” by them, which is the unmarked default in their milieu, that which they most frequently see and interact with.
- 6y ago
- austinjp 6y agoEmoji are pictures, alphabetical letters are not. Racism how?
- dagurp 6y agoWhat was the motivation behind adding skin tones other than racism?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoHow do you define racism?
- thinkingemote 6y agoThe real issue is threefold in nature: definitions of racism have and are changing rapidly, secondly its not any personal (or dictionary) definition that counts but a kind of collective acceptance of a definition which carries the most weight, and thirdly, if someone says they are offended or says that it is actually racism, then they should be listened to. It might not be a problem now, but it could be.
- tashi 6y agoIt would probably be racist if you were only allowed to use the one most closely matching your skin tone. Fortunately we get to choose, so it's not. I like getting to pick colors for things. It's fun. I use colored fonts too sometimes.
- Hoasi 6y agoThis is an interesting way to look at it. Indeed, as innocuous as it is, it forces a person to somehow identify with a skin color or at least make a choice.
- murderfs 6y agoIt's vaguely amusing to me that there's nothing even vaguely resembling an East Asian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Skin_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Skin_color When are the hair color or epicanthic fold ZWJs getting added?
- galgalesh 6y agoNote that the skin tones are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology.
- dang 6y ago> racism "Eschew flamebait." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- enriquto 6y agoI don't understand whats flamebaity about the OP. This is an article literally about skin colors; thus it is somewhat natural that the word "racism" will appear in a harmless way, as here.
- dang 6y agoIt wasn't in a harmless way; it was making an inflammatory accusation of racism; not only that, but in a form which is repeated so often as to be a flamewar trope ("that's racist"), and in a way that clearly signalled ideological battle. That is exactly the sort of thing the HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid.
- enriquto 6y ago> adding different skin tones to emojis is racism Sure. And people with vitiligo are shamefully discriminated against. Bright yellow "skin" was an obviously impossible color that did not identify anybody, and that was beautiful. We have lost this beauty.
- McGlockenshire 6y agoYou have lost nothing. The old emoji are not going away.
- dqpb 6y agoFundamentally, racism is the belief in race. It's bad because the whole concept of race is flawed and therefore applying it to anything else is flawed. However, skin tone is real and skin tone does not equal race. So I don't think skin tone emojis are racist. Rather, I think your argument should be that skin tone emojis will be "triggering" for racists.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoCan anyone help me? I remember reading an article most probably on arstechnica back in 2008 or the like when Apple was said to bring "picture languagee aka emojis" to iPhone os. I remember thinking "something pictographic like Japanese or Chinese? Good luck with that. I aint learning a new language that I have to remember each expression or something ". It turned out pretty good but I still havent gotten used to emojis. I dont use them like the millennials these days making me feel "old"
- arjonagelhout 6y agoI did some digging and found the following posts from around that era: https://www.imore.com/iphone-os-2-2-review https://www.imore.com/iphone-os-2-2-review https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/11/lots-to-like-about-new-iphone-2-2-software-update/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/11/lots-to-like-about-n... https://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/05/iphone-2-2-includes-hidden-japanese-emoji-icons/ https://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/05/iphone-2-2-includes-hid... Emoji support was introduced in iPhone OS 2.2.
- globular-toast 6y agoI find it a bit sad that skin tone emojis exist. When I was young I was taught that skin colour doesn't matter. I actually believed it. Then emojis happened. I leave mine set to yellow.
- FroshKiller 6y agoThanks to white supremacy, what should not matter actually does matter quite a bit, and white people paying lip service to the idea that "skin color does not matter" without acknowledging the history of how it has been made to matter and taking the actions required to make it not matter again just perpetuates white supremacy.
- dqpb 6y ago> Thanks to white supremacy How about "Thanks to Racists, what should not matter actually does matter quite a bit"
- FroshKiller 6y agoBecause "racist" is almost meaningless now, as people who are part of the machinery of white supremacy view "racists" as cartoon villains that do not resemble them. People are often complicit in white supremacy without realizing or indeed without even feeling personal hatred towards non-whites.
- dqpb 6y agoDo you know that racism is not unique to white people?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FroshKiller 6y agoI’d like for you to reflect on why you feel the need to try to make this distinction and do some reading on white supremacy and how we define racism, particularly systemic racism.
- fegu 6y agoThe intricacies of emojis show that they are indeed a whole new language. If you liked the ZWJ mentioned, look into the family or group of people emojis. They are especially complex.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoGiven that skin colors + genders + emojis representing (pieces of) multiple people already show the early stages of combinatorial explosion, I wonder about several things: - How long before fonts will start encoding complex parametric curve generators, to generate complex emojis on the fly, instead of whatever they're currently doing (which I imagine is a bunch of precoded vector graphics + code to recolor and glue them)? - How long before such fonts become some complicated that they become exploitable? I mean, we can already do DOS attacks with Unicode text, but I wonder when it'll cross the threshold to arbitrary code execution? - How long before encoded emojis themselves become Turing-complete? 10 years from now, someone will want to write: Person Facepalming + Bald + Male Sign + Light Skin Tone + Military Uniform + Red + Pin + Gold, [several similar entries describing the rest of the bridge crew of Enterprise-D], Each, Person, Standing In Circle, Each, Robot, Dancing - and we'll have a loop and a conditional branch, pretty much an embedded Forth. On the one hand, that last thing would have disastrous implications - on the other hand, we can only cram so much complexity into emojis before someone will start asking for tools to manage it better...
- hrnnnnnn 6y agoFrom the cursed computer iceberg posted the other week, "font hinting is Turing complete". https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType#Hinting_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType#Hinting_language
- selfhoster11 6y agoBrrr, what an implementation nightmare to even scratch the surface on these topics. It's OK, it's not like I needed to sleep today.
- xxemogirl694uxx 6y ago
- sellyme 6y agoI'll be honest, that was exactly as complicated as I thought it would be. Not sure HN is exactly the target audience for that title. On the bright side, now I can finally finish my all-emoji rendition of Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures.
- neogodless 6y agoThe title correctly included the ambiguous word, "might", and accounted for your correct estimation of the level of complication.
- eknkc 6y agoI wonder if all the gender variants / skin tones etc gets put into much use in real world? I mean yeah, having them is a good idea but they don't seem to be easy to use on emoji keyboards. Do people care enough to choose the correct skin tone and stuff? It is mostly "set it and forget" though for the singular person emojis, so it makes sense. Would you spend time to choose the right tones, genders etc on a handshake emoji?
- Maxion 6y agoI think if it more as of a way to be more individualistic in your expressions. The use cases are most likely as you say, set it and forget it. But as there are a lot of people in the world who have different skin color, there is a need for multiple different skin colored emojis. With handshake being one of the few without a way to customize the skin color it makes sens that it is worked on.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago> But as there are a lot of people in the world who have different skin color, there is a need for multiple different skin colored emojis. Why? The way I look at this graphic: they are schematic cartoon repræsentation of nail-less, hairless hands that are quite minimal, and originally were in a shade of amber that no human skin would ever have. These are clearly abstractions; human hands have a variety of variations to them: - finger length - finger thickness - nail length - amount of hair - visibility of tendons - missing fingers - extra fingers - perhaps partially missing fingers I do not see why such would need to be reflected in a schematic abstraction. Personally, I have long, thin fingers, relatively long nails that are painted black, relative hairlnessness, very visible tendons, and a copper-ish skin color that is not well reflected in all the skin color options. I cannot say I see a particular reason to select something that can approximate the look of my own hands for this, nor can such feasibly be done with the sheer amount of individual variance. > With handshake being one of the few without a way to customize the skin color it makes sens that it is worked on. I agree that excluding handshakes is inconsistent. I simply find it odd to say there is a need whatsoever to allow or skin color customization, and only limit it to what seems to be a linear progression from latte to chestnut, which does not even capture all common tones of human skin, and why would one stop there? If one is going to allow color customization, it seems better to have a mechanism to actually select r.g.b.a. color values. The linear gradient between two polar extremes seems to suggest if anything that it was motivated by a U.S.A. “race” based incentive, that is known to often reason as though what they call “black” and “white” are the only two “races” on the planet. It seems an odd priority with an odd implementation.
- vgel 6y agoWhy couldn’t they do HANDSHAKE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE? I don’t understand why a new emoji is necessary — the author alluded to “making sense without an OS update” but without an OS update the new emojis won’t render at all, whereas this solution would at least kinda make sense (it would be a yellow handshake followed by two skin color blocks, I believe, just like on devices that don’t support skin tone modifiers for other emojis)
- Tistron 6y agoI thought so too first, but I think that would be a quite difficult solution. Skin tone is supposed to only come after some specific code points. We don't want all the grapheme splitting algorithms to break, and it would really change the meaning of zwj fundamentally.
- ghayes 6y agoI’m a bit confused; the article alludes to the fact that the handshake emoji doesn’t include skin tones at all, then solves for adding two different tones. Is there a reason we don’t just have [handshake]+[single skin tone]?
- jariel 6y agoCan someone comment with relevant experience about the fact that maybe emojis should not be part of unicode? And that we should literally just send tiny images as part of text? This way, you know the host system is 100% going to represent what you want to say correctly, that the emoji will look right, and you don't need to worry the system will replace it, that it supports it etc.. And you can literally use 'any emoji' you want. There is an infinite number of things we can put in emojis, why are we trying to standardize such things? I wonder if someone has some insight as to the history around this?
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI doubt Unicode wants them to be part of it. But how it works is that big players send them an advance notice ultimatum which comes down to “Standardize it accordingly, or we'll do it in a nonstandard, hackey fashion ourselves.”, which would cause undesirable chaos. It is indeed a most inelegant situation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- GlitchMr 6y agoEmoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones. Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Japan, so they implemented emojis using Unicode's Private Use Area which initially was a feature only available in Japan, but people quickly figured out how to use them outside of Japan. Emojis became a rather popular feature of iPhones, and Android wanted to have emojis as well, however using Private Use Area just like iPhones did wasn't ideal, so they made a proposal to Unicode Consortium to encode emojis in Unicode. Later, there was a lot of demand to add new emojis, so more and more emojis got encoded into the standard.
- jariel 6y agoOh, I understand all of that of course. I meant some kind of Unicode-specific debate over how it should all work and what the alternatives were.
- 6y ago
- pudmaidai 6y agoYou got yourself into this mess. The good part about emojis is that they were a genderless raceless face. Then people wanted an emoji with a mustache and now good luck introducing 100 emoji combinations every year without upsetting some minority group. I’m still waiting for my Sikh beard emoji.
- watwut 6y agohttps://emojipedia.org/person-wearing-turban/ https://emojipedia.org/person-wearing-turban/
- pudmaidai 6y agoI don’t see my red beard on that. Please address.
- dang 6y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Could you please not create accounts to do that with? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tintor 6y agoWhy exclude female hands from handshake combinations?
- petepete 6y agoIdentified by what? Nail varnish?
- procinct 6y agoPerhaps you could put a bow on the hand?
- oblio 6y agoI hope you're joking :-))
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoIt would be less arbitrary than the visual differences between the male, female, and gender neutral emoji which are pretty much differentiated by hair length. I’d say there are more men with long hair than nail varnish.
- Majestic121 6y agoWhat makes you think females are excluded ? Most females have hands, and hands are a pretty gender neutral part of the body, especially in emoji form.
- bellyfullofbac 6y agoAll the hands have 5 fingers... "able-body-ist" much? Adding 25 new symbols, just for different skin colors, is, well, a hack. And if I want to shake hands with a blue person, do I have to pick the right shade of blue for their hand or society will deem me racist if I pick none or the wrong one? I'm pretty progressive, but some demands are absurd and don't really help society, they just help people identify if you're "hardcore woke" enough.
- 6y ago
- pknerd 6y agoWorld's great minds busy in making emojis.
- vrzistran1337 6y ago>What plus what equals a handshake? This is just a needlessly complicated question. Why not just make it: [handshake] + [Skin Tone] + [ZWJ] + [handshake] + [Skin Tone] = [handshake with first and then second Skin Tone]
- planb 6y agoWow, lots of white guys in the comments talking about how unneccesary that is. Really, just think for a moment if all emoji were changed to a dark skin color and you couldn't change it.
- aetherson 6y agoYour theory here is that all the white guys in this comment thread have incredibly extreme jaundice and a big interest in normalizing bright yellow skin tones?
- runarberg 6y agoThis was answered pretty thoroughly elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27047379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27047379
- galgalesh 6y agoIn addition, I'd like to add this quote from the original draft introducing skin tones in unicode: > The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (nonhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette.
- Chris2048 6y agoBy "pretty thoroughly" you mean "they mention the Simpsons and extrapolate"? Because Springfield is pretty explicitly set in North America, with a strong indication the characters are white - no such context exists in emojis.
- vrzistran1337 6y agoPeople wouldn't care. Like they didn't care when everyone "was yellow" and scoring social inclusivity points wasn't a real thing yet. Now let me just sharpie over the word "slave" on my 20 year old HDD jumpers...
- 6y ago
- qwerty456127 6y agoSo, the subject has proven toxic once again. I submitted my option, got +16 positive vote and a rather civilized (and reasonably big) discussion tree but got flagged.
- runarberg 6y agoThere was a resent discussion about the implicit downranking of topics around diversity and inclusion[1]. It is in fact listed among the undocumented features of Hacker News[2]. Although I consider this a bug not a feature. Some of the comments here are indeed interesting and I have learned stuff reading through it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867142 2: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#implicit-downranking-of-topics-around-diversity-and-inclusion https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#implic...
- sokoloff 6y agoI read [2] to mean that it’s a human bug/feature rather part of the computer system in HN (“implicit” meaning “emergent”).
- hnbad 6y agoTheir "option" prompting the "rather civilized" discussion was that skin tone modifiers are the real racism. Dang flagged it as flamebait, which it was. The HN audience has a certain political bias which results in discussions around diversity, inclusion and racism always going downhill fast. But this is separate from and only tangentially related to the implicit downranking you're mentioning (tho I'm sure this decision is motivated by a desire not to have front-page comments be this blatantly tilted towards this particular political "slant").
- qwerty456127 6y agoWhat I meant under "rather civilized" was it didn't seem "going downhill" - I didn't notice any hate speech or pointless arguments in the discussion followed, only people reasonably expressing what they think in a calm manner. I myself didn't intend any bait but expressed my genuine thoughts on the subject. I am not sure if you cared to understand the point rather than stick to the first sentence yet I'm hesitant to explain it as I have little doubt at least somebody will flag it again. I don't believe sustainable organic progress is possible in the areas where discussion and opinion diversity is not allowed though. Even if there is in fact only one opinion which really is right (e.g. like in the flat Earth discussion) people sharing it have to listen to the opponents and explain it to them with patience and care if they want to make change (despite the fact most of the opponents won't listen - some will, among lurkers especially).
- OldGoodNewBad 6y agoSkin tone emoji are just too far. Return to monochrome.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoI agree. It’s frustrating when I want to send a thumbs up but when I type :thumbs it shows me thumbs down in 5 colours. I’m not sure what the point was when the yellow ones already covered everyone. Although I have to say, the gender neutral emoji are the most puzzling and seem to enforce weird stereotypes. According to the Unicode spec. Men are people with short hair and blue shirts, woman are people with long hair and red shirts. And gender neutral people are people who have medium hair and grey shirts.
- swiley 6y agoThis is something I like about GNU unifont. The emojis all just use the text color.
- BigMajestic 6y agoWhy? Why so much effort is put in something so meaningless as emojis? There's nothing more confusing than messages with emojis. When I read the text I know what information writer wanted to send me because it was all coded inside the text. When I see emoji I have to stop and think, what the writer wanted. Is it part of the information or just the background noise? Should I 'read' this emoji as a part of the sentence or as a separate phrase? Clear text is just so much less confusing.
- 3v1n0 6y agoThis is untrue... Like all the stuff have not to be abused, but when used properly they're great also in technical communication (including code comments or git commits). Another story is when you write with them and instead of a formatting tool become your words.
- masklinn 6y ago> Why? Why not? Why do you care about the effort other people put into things that they care about? To such an extent that you’ll put effort into criticising things which are of literally no relevance to you? > Clear text is just so much less confusing. Yeah nah. Just because you’re not hip to it doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. I don’t understand most slangs, whether in my own mother tongue or in foreign langages I more or less understand. That doesn’t mean I’m going to assert cockney rhyming slang or verlan is “meaningless”.
- eldaisfish 6y agoYou've missed the point completely and have created a strawman-based rant. The problem with emoji is that there is no dictionary, no standardised meaning or interpretation guidelines; no unified, context-dependent cues that everyone subconsciously agrees to. When you try to communicate non-verbal cues using them, it works well because there is a general understanding of what is meant though even there, cultural differences sometimes get in the way. Something like a smile cuts across cultures pretty universally. When emoji start getting overused to the point where you have to draw meaning from the skin tones involved in a handshake, that's a step too far IMHO. This is precisely why we struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics and precisely why emoji must remain a supplement to language, not a replacement for it as many use.
- Thorentis 6y agoWhy couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoBecause Unicode emoji started out with a bunch of crap they couldn’t ever say no to new proposals because someone will say “why do we need a man levitating emoji and not skin tone modifiers?” And while we are at it, we need a woman levitating and gender neutral person levitating.
- enriquto 6y agoHow do you know if they are men or women? Just because of their hair? That's pretty non-inclusive!
- klyrs 6y agoThe emoji is literally named "Man in Business Suit Levitating" by the unicode consortium
- throw0101a 6y ago> Because Unicode emoji started out with It started out with the 'base' symbols of a bunch of Japanese mobile carriers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#The_origin_of_emoji_pictograms_(1990s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#The_origin_of_emoji_pict... If they simply stuck with supporting those for legacy reasons, then things would have been fine. But no line in the sand was drawn. IMHO there should be a moratorium for (say) five years to let things settle, and see new ones are actually needed, or if it's just inertia driving recent additions.
- ceejayoz 6y agoWhy? What's the downside to having a bunch?
- oefrha 6y agoI’m sure the next step for the handshake emoji is people complaining about hands with five fingers being “ableist”, and subsequently a number-of-fingers modifier will be added.
- wodenokoto 6y agoThe article is quite unclear as to why a new collection of code points is needed to represent a handshake. It is in fact so unclear that I halfway through ended up confused as to if the author was trying to add handshake into Unicode or to add color to an already existing handshake emoji. Reading through comments here, it seems that A) there does indeed already exist a handshake code point. B) Unicode does not allow adding two colors to a single code point, so author needs to invent a collection of code points that can represent an already existing emoji, in order to allow for different colored hands shaking.
- donohoe 6y agoFor you it was unclear, for me it was very clear. The world keeps turning.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoI just want to know when I can change the colour of the bike shed emoji
- xdennis 6y agoI find this very problematic. What about people with 6 fingers? And why are all the hands male? And why can't you paint each nail in a different colour? And ...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Loughla 6y agoWhat's nice is that you can volunteer to help the Unicode Consortium to build those things if you believe you have the ability!
- nickdothutton 6y agoThanks America.
- pb060 6y agoWhat about family emojis then, e.g. https://emojipedia.org/family-woman-woman-girl-boy/ https://emojipedia.org/family-woman-woman-girl-boy/? Blended families are not there. I am the third of three sons, why am I not represented?
- pbronez 6y agoGood question. Maybe this handshake work paves the way to make other emoji more representative too! I bet you could reach out to the author and get involved with making that change.
- barbazoo 6y agoI wonder if that emoji could procedurally be generated on the client without officially deploying every combination to the standard. Male child + Yellow + ZWJ + Gender Neutral child + Yellow + ZWJ + ... And then it builds up the family emoji from the inside out.
- kevincox 6y agoI believe you mean child + male + ZWJ + child + ZWJ ... I think it was mostly a mistake that the joiners started occurring later. Expressed eloquently in https://xkcd.com/1813/ https://xkcd.com/1813/
- Yver 6y agoThe same multi-tone scheme would generate more than 10,000 combinations for the family emoji. I wonder if it will ever be seriously considered.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xxemogirl694uxx 6y agoThis was proposed: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19392-emoji-multi-recs.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19392-emoji-multi-recs.pdf And declined to make RGI: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114r-family-emoji-explor.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114r-family-emoji-explor....
- upofadown 6y agoIt used to be that "plain text" was pretty much impossible to make malicious. Security conscious people have the option of only interpreting plain text emails, for example. This seems to be another example of the human imperative to increase the complexity of everything until it become problematic and then unusable. I suppose in the future there will be people that refuse to interpret emojis...
- foobar33333 6y agoUnicode weirdness has been used to exploit ios multiple times already.
- aethertron 6y agoThe future's now. Try posting emoji on HN!
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- fossuser 6y agoI’m curious what the middle finger emoji origin story she mentions is, I couldn’t find anything interesting searching around for it.
- rscoots 6y agoGood Q. This comment and the subject of the article remind me of a very unrelated article I just read about obscenities. "...[societal] concern [about obscenety] has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological" The middle finger emoji doesn't raise an eyebrow today but would've been unthinkable in the not-so-distant past. Today we've got the best and the brightest invested in cracking the hard cases around skin tone instead.
- _ZeD_ 6y agoI think this missed the left handed peoples (joking)
- neogodless 6y agoEmojis are designed for annotating selfies, and as such, are all mirror images of left hands.
- Trasmatta 6y agoLeft handed people shake with their right hands
- avaldes 6y agoWhat about hands with gloves? Almost two years in a pandemic it should be standard by now. And what about consent? If I send you a handshake you don't have the chance to let me hanging. Same for the fist bump. My grandpa lost 3 fingers in a milling machine and he doesn't feel comfortable using 5 fingers hand emojis. Heck he can't even feel his left hand is represented because all emojis have perfectly straight fingers and he has artritis. Also, both hands in the handshake emoji are the same complexion. What about fat people with fat fingers? Or people with Marfan syndrome and disproportionately long fingers? It looks to me that the emoji industry is ripe for disruption. /s
- swiley 6y agoSince we have all these combining colored graphic characters when can we get a combining character to change the background/foreground color? What about a table of sixel pseudo graphic characters?
- pcsalad 6y agoNever thought about it honestly. thanks OP
- silon42 6y agoBut we now need a version with elbows.
- mLuby 6y agoAs an English speaker I don't gender my speech about myself. But to use some emoji (e.g. facepalming) I must gender that speech, and therefore myself. I'd prefer not to have to do this, especially to relative strangers on the Internet, so I appreciate that "person-facepalming" is becoming available on more platforms. It'd be nice if the gendered variants were collapsed a bit (like the skin color variants) to reduce clutter.
- yeahr4579 6y agoI don’t use emojis much but if you use Discord they have male, female and “person”! I always use person because I feel weird specifically selecting what gender I am. Feels like I’m making a “big” deal out of nothing I guess
- andai 6y agoIf your goal is anonymity, it's worth nothing that you are revealing more bits of information about yourself by using the person-facepalming variant than one of the gendered ones.
- lolsal 6y agoWhat makes you think this is about anonymity? I would guess it's more about the author's identity and being represented in technological evolutions since we absolutely have the technology these days.
- mLuby 6y agoIs that because it's more unusual, like being very anonymous in a little pond? Or maybe you mean something else.
- globular-toast 6y agoIt's more conspicuous, yes. If you want to be more anonymous online, I would assume a male persona.
- fsociety 6y agoIt doesn't sit right with me that a comment here was flagged for saying that there are a bunch of white guys in here complaining about this. It is worth sitting down and thinking about why some people feel attacked when reading an article about adding non-yellow skin tones to emojis. Why they feel the need to post that, "I can't choose a cyan skin tone so I am offended", or that "non-yellow emojis are a waste of human effort", or worse that "yellow is a universal skin tone".
- kalal 6y agoTo a colorblind person (me included), this discussion is absolutely irrelevant. Why not to focus on edges instead? A black and white picture would solve all such nonsense.
- clolege 6y agoThe handshake emoji bothers me for the same reason as the fist-bump emoji on slack - it ignores consent. What if the receiver doesn't want to shake your hand? Or what if they don't identify with the skin tone that you chose for them? These types of emojis would be more powerful if all parties had to engage to make them happen. Senders would have to run the risk of being left hanging, which would make a successful shake/bump mean a lot more, and everyone could choose their own skin tones. My beef is likely with the chat apps that implement this functionality rather than the emoji spec itself, but the implication of letting one person choose the color of both hands in an interaction like this seems to further complicate the consent issue.
- beervirus 6y agoYeah it’s a real dystopia out there.
- gumby 6y ago> Think of it this way; if emoji are letters, emoji variants are sort of like diacritics. Lovely clarifying metaphor. On the machine I’m using right now I can’t display an emoji combined with an alphabetic diacritic. In fact there is no UI to construct it; I had to write a tiny program to output the sequence. Clearly this is something that should be the Unicode standard.
- gumby 6y agoI like the relief of the 4,500 year old handshake. The Hilltop Hoods made a hit song about the topic of handshakes!
- aasasd 6y agoBah! Could've had both hands with just one new emoji by also introducing a mirror-code, so my trains could finally choo-choo the other way. But nooooo. (Maybe it's not possible technically just like two skin tones after one handshake? Dunno.)
- aviraldg 6y agoThe amusing bit about the controversy on this thread is that almost no one would agree to automatically add a footer to their messages that specifies their race, but that's sort of what this does and some people are actively advocating for it.
- agarv 6y agoAn increasing number people do do this now, just at the start of their messages. "As a cis white male..."
- JohnWhigham 6y agoAgreed. The Internet is humanity's greatest invention, unlocking bodies upon bodies of knowledge to the world, and yet what do most of the people on it now do? Sit around and complain about the most inane trivial shit like emoji color combinations, or why a massive corporation's comic book movie franchise didn't have representation of some group or something. It's disheartening that people ascribe importance to these things. Every little thing is a massive battle.
- agarv 6y agoSomething that I don't see mentioned is that this emoji opens the door to accidental racism because you are assuming the other person's race when you use it, since presumably one of the hands belongs to the person you are speaking to. This contrasts with something like the thumbs up emoji, where it is meant to represent your own hand, and so you can make it any color you want. It is also not clear if you use it, which hand is supposed to be yours- I am the hand on the left or the hand on the right?
- waydowntogo 6y agoThis guys are so bored they see racism everywhere.
- j-pb 6y agoUnicode is truly the herald of complexity hell. How can you make the foundational stuff so complicated. It still needs to be build and implemented. I just want ASCII even though it doesn't even support my native language well. Computers could solve so many problems, but we waste them on emoji.
- bilater 6y agoI'm brown and refuse to use any other emoji then the default one on principle. It pisses of some of my friends which pisses me off in turn because it is such a BS issue to devote any mental space to. Oh shit I just wasted 10 minutes of my day on this crap again.
- pjs_ 6y agoLet's just cut to the chase and do GAN emojis, such that :bald-child-with-icecream: is generated on the fly by something like this https://github.com/Rakshith-Manandi/text-to-image-using-GAN https://github.com/Rakshith-Manandi/text-to-image-using-GAN
- pjs_ 6y agoAh, of course someone already did it: http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2017/final-reports/5244346.pdf http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2017/final-reports/5244346.pdf Love the examples!