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Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms.

PurpleFoxy 5y ago
Because 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 5y ago
  How do you know if they are men or women? Just because of their hair? That's pretty non-inclusive!
  - klyrs 5y ago
    The emoji is literally named "Man in Business Suit Levitating" by the unicode consortium
- throw0101a 5y 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 5y ago
    Why? What's the downside to having a bunch?
    - yummypaint 5y ago
      I can't think of one. There are already far too many of them to view at once on a phone, so adding more doesn't make things much more disorganized. Storage capabilities also grow faster than the standard adds new symbols. Frankly I think it's a bad look when people suddenly become very passionate about opposing updates once they are reminded of the existence of dark skinned emojis. They're just silly little drawings, people. If someone is so upset by others being able to send silly little drawings that vaguely resemble themselves, they should do some introspecting.
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      What problem does adding all of these random 'hieroglyphs' solve? We have: * Grinning Face {, Big Eyes, Smiling Eyes, Sweat} * (Slightly) Smiling Face {, Smiling Eyes, Halo, Hearts, Heart-Eyes} * (Wo)man {,Bald, Red Hair, Curly Hair, White Hair, Blond Hair} * Family: {{,M,W}, {M,W}, {,B,G}[1-2] } * Leg, Foot, Ear (with Hearing Aide), Nose, Brain, Longs, Tooth, Bone, Eye(s), Tongue, Mouth * {, Man, Woman} {Superhero, Supervillain, Mage, Fairy, Vampire, Elf, Genie, Zombie} How many combinations / permutations do we need? * https://emojipedia.org/people/ https://emojipedia.org/people/
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > What problem does adding all of these random 'hieroglyphs' solve? That's a dodge. You proposed a five year moratorium on new emoji. I'm asking what harm is caused by these that justifies that. "I personally find them pointless" isn't a great reason to deny the folks who clearly find proposing and implementing them to be worthwhile. (Side note: "Update your device to get the new emoji" is a great way to get folks doing their security patching regularly.)
        throw0101a 5y ago
        Time used to implement all of these things is time not spent working on more 'useful' things. Like, from a comment up-thread, languages and scripts that people use in their daily lives: * https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
jakobnissen 5y ago
It's US's current cultural trend, which is now enforced on the rest of the world, and also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities. Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms. Related: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
- 542458 5y ago
  > also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion. Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.
  - jakobnissen 5y ago
    The problem is that it's not about human language. If it was about human language, the consortium would give a shit about Bengali speakers. It's about the sensibilities of a small, particular group of privileged people, in a particular time at a particular place, who consider their weird priorities to be universal. Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode. In practice, the consortium has to prioritize what symbols to support. So, in practice, it's less "embracing all variants of human expression", and more "the ability to communicate in your native language doesn't matter as much as the gender identity of this police emoji".
    - 542458 5y ago
      What’s wrong with the Bengali character set? A Google search doesn’t show any discussion on limitations here. And while power and privilege do inevitably play an unintended role in prioritization, Unicode successfully encodes several entirely dead languages - so it’s not like everything not relevant to English speakers has fallen by the wayside. And while you’re correct that emojii do require some amount of UTC resources, it’s worth noting that most of that work is done by a special subcommittee to not distract from the mainline work of other languages, and that emojii have brought new attention and new volunteers to TUC - so I’m not sure how significant the impact of adding emojii to their workload really is.
3v1n0 5y ago
Well complexity in technology is not really something we try to stay away, is it?
libeclipse 5y ago
Agreed. The fallback emoji in particular is very confusing, doesn't look like a handshake, and is only necessary because of this particular solution to a problem that no one had.
lucas_codes 5y ago
Although yellow seems like it's good for everyone (since no one is actually yellow), it ends up still representing the majority. Just look at the Simpsons - all the characters are yellow, but not Apu. Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.
- virologist 5y ago
  i have never seen a yellow person except in cartoons and emoji
  - SamBam 5y ago
    What race do you think the yellow characters on the Simpsons are supposed to represent?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fuzzer37 5y ago
      A null race that doesn't exist
      - moate 5y ago
        So the majority of people are yellow, and yet we still have black/brown characters (Bleeding Gums Murphy, Apu, Carl, Dr. Hibbert, etc) and most East Asian characters were given almond shaped eyes. It's almost like there's a correspondence with the "average" yellow Simpson's character and some real world US ethnic majority...
      - SamBam 5y ago
        So, Carl Carlson, Dr. Hibbert and Bleeding Gums Murphy are pretty clearly Black, Apu is pretty clearly Indian, Bumble Bee man is pretty clearly Mexican, but all the yellow characters are... "a null race?" Despite all clearly having signifiers of white people, and several of them clearly ethnically Italian or German, and most of the rest being Waspy? Does this not simply speak of what you perceive as the "null race" or, perhaps, default race? And when the Simpson's producers said a few years ago that they were going to stop voicing non-white characters with non-white actors, who did they find to voice all the "null-race" characters?
celticninja 5y ago
Exactly, yellow was neutral and in line with emojis in general. Now do I have to decide on my skin tone? Will people get offended if I choose a darker tone? And what would someone use a handshake emoji for exactly?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Latty 5y ago
I wonder why I see the take "I don't use this thing/see the value, therefore it is bad and shouldn't exist." so much more on HN than anywhere else? It's such a weird view.
- username90 5y ago
  I didn't read his statement like that at all. Sounds like just your biased take about opinions you don't like, and that you don't find opinions you don't like much outside HN.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    The statement "Introducing skin tone provided no advantage" is pretty ignorant and unaware, especially when skin tone variants are widely used so they objectively hold some utility. At best it's an uninformed and lazy take, at worst it's someone showing their lack of empathy and distain for people who don't look like them.
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      Huh? What if they just don’t think it’s something worth having in unicode? This does just seem like disdain for opinions you don’t hold. I think it would also be unnecessary to add modifiers to unicode that let me, say, represent a glyph of a man in a dress, or a modifier that lets you use those family emojis while clarifying that one of the parents is an amputee. Just because you can find someone who can write a twitter thread on why those additions are absolutely necessary doesn’t mean I’m lazy or disdainful or, let’s say, transphobic/ableist.
      - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
        What is it to you what is put in Unicode? Seriously, how does it affect you in anyway what is put into Unicode? We should be making things _more_ accessible and if that means adding all of the necessary variations of emoji to represent humanity, as it is, than I'm all for that and so should everyone else because it costs us literally zero to do. Any argument to the contrary really needs to examine from what angle they're making their argument because they are not based on empathy but something of the opposite.
542458 5y ago
From what I’ve seen, the skin tone feature sees lots of use (particularly in some minority communities), which to me is a good indication that this is something that people wanted.
- jessedhillon 5y ago
  Not at all. Major apps and OSes put a "choose your race" message on their UI (and very strongly direct people to make that choice). This does not mean there was pre-existing latent demand for this. What this shows is if you inject the concept of racial self-identity onto cartoon symbols, and afford people a way to navigate that selection, people can do that. Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial.
  - andrewzah 5y ago
    "Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial." Usage clearly states otherwise. No one is forced to use a particular skin tone (they can continue using the default yellow one). This comment frankly is quite dismissive. Just because you don't use a feature doesn't mean "no one wanted it".
    - jessedhillon 5y ago
      Users follow prompts, so "people choose a race when presented with a racialized emoji picker" doesn't mean "people want their emojis racialized". It means, people understand what they are being asked to do, and want to get back to their business. You would need to have a theory of benefit, and then design a survey which tests users to understand if that benefit was achieved. You, frankly, are confused about causation -- we put a dialog in front of people and they made a selection, therefore people wanted this dialog?
      - andrewzah 5y ago
        "we put a dialog in front of people and they made a selection, therefore people wanted this dialog" You're suggesting that it's impossible for people to have wanted a feature, because UXs have a popup showing people that it's possible to use that feature now. I disagree. You're projecting your personal opinion as everyone's personal opinion. And that emoji picker still allows you to pick the default yellow color. So if people -really- didn't want to use them, they wouldn't.
hrjykrlfkfk 5y ago
Because it "erases Blackness and centers whiteness as a default", that's the standard answer. Yellow codes for the default, which is whiteness. Or said another way, white skin is the only unracialized skin color. Thus the supposedly neutral yellow stands for it.
- virologist 5y ago
  we are talking about yellow here. not black or white.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Yellow is a stand-in for "any skin tone".
  - nobodywasishere 5y ago
    Yellow is stand-in for white
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Proof? Besides, we've got to have some sort of skin tone to stand for skin tones that are absent or not given for some reason. It's got to be _some_ colour, and it might as well be yellow.
Chris2048 5y ago
It's funny how gender-neutral terms where sought after, but we need alternatives to race-neutral emojis.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  "We should have options to choose from" is a pretty consistent approach.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    Until someone chooses white, and potentially benefits from it.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      If using a white-skinned emoji gets you special treatment the yellow, brown, or black-skinned emoji does not, I think that's worth being concerned about. Until that happens, there are probably bigger fish to fry.
hrktb 5y ago
We can’t eternally keep the status quo just to avoid opening cans of worms. If we don’t intend to throw it away, we might as well open it and face the worms. This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null. But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
- fossuser 5y ago
  I think skin tone color band aids are different, people have different skin tones and the old default only blended well on people with light skin so the new ones are nice for people. With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
  - Timpy 5y ago
    I agree that it would be a more apt comparison if the original band-aid color where neon pink, or some other non-human-skin-tone.
    - fossuser 5y ago
      Yeah - even then it’s not perfect because people in real life may have a cosmetic interest in skin tone matching bandages. It’s not about inserting race, it’s about blending the bandage so it looks nice. With emoji, it’s different - it’s explicitly about inserting race into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this type of thing is generally worse for society. It leads to people thinking about our differences more than our similarities.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    > neutral non-racial thing But was it really? Serious question: Do you think that if the majority of people in the US, and particularly the majority of middle and upper classes and tech folk, were Black that they would have defaulted to a yellow color for emoji? That's not even getting into how all the "man" "woman" "child" etc emoji had stereotypical white-people hair etc.
lucretian 5y ago
> Introducing skin tone provided no advantage awfully confident take.
sim_card_map 5y ago
emojis was a mistake
kome 5y ago
> Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms. I 100% agree. But technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Last fall, I found the plist files which control OS X's character picker, and spent an evening backporting seven years worth of new emojis to OS X 10.9 Mavericks[1]. The one thing I couldn't get working was skin tone variants, because Mavericks has no concept of them. All emojis in the picker are yellow. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got a really nasty email accusing me of being all sorts of racial things, because I hadn't included skin tones. I don't know if this person was just trolling or crazy or what, but they were really mad! I'd never received an email like this before, so I was pretty upset. 1: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emoji-picker.2260530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...
- eplanit 5y ago
  One complaint, from an irrationally upset person, can and should be ignored. It's way past time to stop giving power to the vocal minority.
teachingassist 5y ago
The Simpsons (partially serious). Coloring Black and Asian characters with skin tones, means that yellow in the Simpsons represents only white people.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  The Simpsons is not the authority on the meaning of yellow skin for generically representing human body parts. It’s a tv show. The iconic happy face symbol is not intended to specifically be a white person. Pac man is not a white person.
  - andrewzah 5y ago
    I agree that they're not an -authority-, but the Simpsons is a huge cultural institution. They definitely made an impact on how the yellow tone is coded (as white). So yes it seems silly, but I think a default of blue or green would be better.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      This is a very North America centric view I think. The Simpsons aren't nearly as popular in other countries.
      - teachingassist 5y ago
        I tried to informally fact-check this and I found out (for example) that The Simpsons is dubbed into Luxembourgish.
sigzero 5y ago
Yes, we should have 100%.
batch12 5y ago
I don't have an issue with this-- if people find value in it, fine. I don't think I will use this though. There are too many combinations that I am too likely to get wrong.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
The appearance of skin tone emojis are bad enough but the thought that someone consciously took their time to choose the skin tone of the emoji that best matched their own in their mobile phone UI makes it that much more bad.
oblio 5y ago
I've seen plenty of people use a different emoji skin tone. So there was demand for it, you just never noticed it.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Or just 100% get rid of skin tone and use an outline of a hand.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  Yeah, in retrospect going from the original Docomo-style of emoji[0] to the more graphical ones[1] was a step back [0] https://emojipedia.org/docomo/ https://emojipedia.org/docomo/ [1] https://emojipedia.org/softbank/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/ edit: although to be fair to Softbank, it seems their initial color version had pink faces https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/
bonaldi 5y ago
Emojis communicate. Race of the speaker can add important context to the thing being communicated. Adding skin tone to emojis allows them to communicate this. With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation. TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.
- f1refly 5y ago
  what could you possibly add to a debate that is altered by an emphasis your skin tone before you bring it up?
  - bonaldi 5y ago
    I'm slightly amazed that nobody sees any value in being able to talk about race using a full range of expression. The wave-hand emoji with a black colour allows you to compactly say "+1 as a black person", for example. That means emojis now support conversations about race. I've seen it used exactly like this in the wild in multiple fora.
    - f1refly 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. My point is why it is important what colour your skin is. Are there arguments that are only valid because someone is white? Isn't that racist?
      - bonaldi 5y ago
        Why is it important to be able to talk about what colour your skin is? Have you lived through the past year? There is more to language than debate-club argumentation, too. Consider - why is it important what gender someone is? Or age? Should emoji only have had unisex and age-less figures instead of its current set? Is it sexist to use a female-presenting emoji? These things all have obvious utility for communication, and you're ending up making some deeply strange arguments to try and dismiss that utility.
dkla 5y ago
Because the "left" pushes for racial segregation again (at least mentally), starting with pre-schoolers.
fsociety 5y ago
It is so people can express themselves with emojis that represent their own skin color. Seems important, no?
layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
Because Americans are obsessed with skin color.
- moate 5y ago
  Yes, Americans invented the Cotton Gin and Racism around the same time, and no other culture ever has cared at all about representation or inclusion./s I doubt this was solely Americans or that Americans are the only group of people that care about race/ethnicity. Maybe your findings are different. Please let me know where to find your publishings.
  - layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
    Yikes! Like I said, obsessed... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There are way more ethnicities and races than skin colors. E.g. there are hundreds of distinct ethnicities in Europe that Americans would merrily categorize as "white" based on their obsession with melanin.
    - moate 5y ago
      I don't understand your thesis. Only Americans care about race? Only Americans homogenize outside cultures? I mean you just rolled a country large enough to encompass 30 different European countries, where over 300 different languages are spoken into a single cultural belief system, but go off sis... Your point: There are more races/ethnicities than skin colors would show exactly why it should be relatively simple to undertake this project: a black person from the US, Congo, or the Dominican Republic could all use the same emoji. I get that you seem to be here exclusively to dunk on ugly American, but I don't think caring about race is something exclusive to the US. If you're from Europe, remember: we learned it from watching you dad.
planb 5y ago
You could argue the same for gendered emojis.
gumby 5y ago
Why shouldn’t people have a way to express themselves that they want? Are there words or spellings that computers should refuse to display? I am not a fan of how Unicode has treated emojis, but there is no question they are completely within scope in principle (they were part of extant keitai character sets) though the way they are being extended by the UCS makes me uncomfortable. But so what? People like to use them which seems like enough justification.
crumbshot 5y ago
> Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages. After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-rept.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-re... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf Based on this, the Consortium refined it into their own proposal that used the Fitzpatrick scale for skin tone modifiers: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf And then, eventually, these were included in Unicode 8.0.
- hnnnnnnng 5y ago
  I find it offensive that they don't offer a color that is close to my skin color.
baggy_trough 5y ago
Yellow is ugly.
JoeyBananas 5y ago
unicode itself is a terrible can of worms. There are so many edge cases that adding black emojis is hardly a big deal. Black emojis is not complicated compared to some of the languages out there.
akomtu 5y ago
You'd be fired for this comment in any big american corp today. The big players in the US have been pushing a new version of the divide&conquer agenda to the poor so they wouldn't accidentally develop class conscience. Basically, most Americans are being divided along the gender and race lines: men vs women vs trans, and white vs black vs asian vs latino. The goal must be dividing the society into a few tens of alienated camps that don't talk to each other. This policy is being pushed hard at every level: from schools and offices, to DoD and WH. It's pretty much an awkward religion or rather a cult, with church, heresy, bishops and inquisition.

PurpleFoxy 5y ago

Because 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 5y ago
How do you know if they are men or women? Just because of their hair? That's pretty non-inclusive!
- klyrs 5y ago
  The emoji is literally named "Man in Business Suit Levitating" by the unicode consortium
throw0101a 5y 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 5y ago
  Why? What's the downside to having a bunch?
  - yummypaint 5y ago
    I can't think of one. There are already far too many of them to view at once on a phone, so adding more doesn't make things much more disorganized. Storage capabilities also grow faster than the standard adds new symbols. Frankly I think it's a bad look when people suddenly become very passionate about opposing updates once they are reminded of the existence of dark skinned emojis. They're just silly little drawings, people. If someone is so upset by others being able to send silly little drawings that vaguely resemble themselves, they should do some introspecting.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    What problem does adding all of these random 'hieroglyphs' solve? We have: * Grinning Face {, Big Eyes, Smiling Eyes, Sweat} * (Slightly) Smiling Face {, Smiling Eyes, Halo, Hearts, Heart-Eyes} * (Wo)man {,Bald, Red Hair, Curly Hair, White Hair, Blond Hair} * Family: {{,M,W}, {M,W}, {,B,G}[1-2] } * Leg, Foot, Ear (with Hearing Aide), Nose, Brain, Longs, Tooth, Bone, Eye(s), Tongue, Mouth * {, Man, Woman} {Superhero, Supervillain, Mage, Fairy, Vampire, Elf, Genie, Zombie} How many combinations / permutations do we need? * https://emojipedia.org/people/ https://emojipedia.org/people/
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > What problem does adding all of these random 'hieroglyphs' solve? That's a dodge. You proposed a five year moratorium on new emoji. I'm asking what harm is caused by these that justifies that. "I personally find them pointless" isn't a great reason to deny the folks who clearly find proposing and implementing them to be worthwhile. (Side note: "Update your device to get the new emoji" is a great way to get folks doing their security patching regularly.)
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        Time used to implement all of these things is time not spent working on more 'useful' things. Like, from a comment up-thread, languages and scripts that people use in their daily lives: * https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...

jakobnissen 5y ago

It's US's current cultural trend, which is now enforced on the rest of the world, and also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities. Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms. Related: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...

542458 5y ago
> also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion. Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.
- jakobnissen 5y ago
  The problem is that it's not about human language. If it was about human language, the consortium would give a shit about Bengali speakers. It's about the sensibilities of a small, particular group of privileged people, in a particular time at a particular place, who consider their weird priorities to be universal. Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode. In practice, the consortium has to prioritize what symbols to support. So, in practice, it's less "embracing all variants of human expression", and more "the ability to communicate in your native language doesn't matter as much as the gender identity of this police emoji".
  - 542458 5y ago
    What’s wrong with the Bengali character set? A Google search doesn’t show any discussion on limitations here. And while power and privilege do inevitably play an unintended role in prioritization, Unicode successfully encodes several entirely dead languages - so it’s not like everything not relevant to English speakers has fallen by the wayside. And while you’re correct that emojii do require some amount of UTC resources, it’s worth noting that most of that work is done by a special subcommittee to not distract from the mainline work of other languages, and that emojii have brought new attention and new volunteers to TUC - so I’m not sure how significant the impact of adding emojii to their workload really is.

3v1n0 5y ago

Well complexity in technology is not really something we try to stay away, is it?

libeclipse 5y ago

Agreed. The fallback emoji in particular is very confusing, doesn't look like a handshake, and is only necessary because of this particular solution to a problem that no one had.

lucas_codes 5y ago

Although yellow seems like it's good for everyone (since no one is actually yellow), it ends up still representing the majority. Just look at the Simpsons - all the characters are yellow, but not Apu. Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.

virologist 5y ago
i have never seen a yellow person except in cartoons and emoji
- SamBam 5y ago
  What race do you think the yellow characters on the Simpsons are supposed to represent?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    A null race that doesn't exist
    - moate 5y ago
      So the majority of people are yellow, and yet we still have black/brown characters (Bleeding Gums Murphy, Apu, Carl, Dr. Hibbert, etc) and most East Asian characters were given almond shaped eyes. It's almost like there's a correspondence with the "average" yellow Simpson's character and some real world US ethnic majority...
    - SamBam 5y ago
      So, Carl Carlson, Dr. Hibbert and Bleeding Gums Murphy are pretty clearly Black, Apu is pretty clearly Indian, Bumble Bee man is pretty clearly Mexican, but all the yellow characters are... "a null race?" Despite all clearly having signifiers of white people, and several of them clearly ethnically Italian or German, and most of the rest being Waspy? Does this not simply speak of what you perceive as the "null race" or, perhaps, default race? And when the Simpson's producers said a few years ago that they were going to stop voicing non-white characters with non-white actors, who did they find to voice all the "null-race" characters?

celticninja 5y ago

Exactly, yellow was neutral and in line with emojis in general. Now do I have to decide on my skin tone? Will people get offended if I choose a darker tone? And what would someone use a handshake emoji for exactly?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Latty 5y ago

I wonder why I see the take "I don't use this thing/see the value, therefore it is bad and shouldn't exist." so much more on HN than anywhere else? It's such a weird view.

username90 5y ago
I didn't read his statement like that at all. Sounds like just your biased take about opinions you don't like, and that you don't find opinions you don't like much outside HN.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  The statement "Introducing skin tone provided no advantage" is pretty ignorant and unaware, especially when skin tone variants are widely used so they objectively hold some utility. At best it's an uninformed and lazy take, at worst it's someone showing their lack of empathy and distain for people who don't look like them.
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    Huh? What if they just don’t think it’s something worth having in unicode? This does just seem like disdain for opinions you don’t hold. I think it would also be unnecessary to add modifiers to unicode that let me, say, represent a glyph of a man in a dress, or a modifier that lets you use those family emojis while clarifying that one of the parents is an amputee. Just because you can find someone who can write a twitter thread on why those additions are absolutely necessary doesn’t mean I’m lazy or disdainful or, let’s say, transphobic/ableist.
    - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      What is it to you what is put in Unicode? Seriously, how does it affect you in anyway what is put into Unicode? We should be making things _more_ accessible and if that means adding all of the necessary variations of emoji to represent humanity, as it is, than I'm all for that and so should everyone else because it costs us literally zero to do. Any argument to the contrary really needs to examine from what angle they're making their argument because they are not based on empathy but something of the opposite.

542458 5y ago

From what I’ve seen, the skin tone feature sees lots of use (particularly in some minority communities), which to me is a good indication that this is something that people wanted.

jessedhillon 5y ago
Not at all. Major apps and OSes put a "choose your race" message on their UI (and very strongly direct people to make that choice). This does not mean there was pre-existing latent demand for this. What this shows is if you inject the concept of racial self-identity onto cartoon symbols, and afford people a way to navigate that selection, people can do that. Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  "Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial." Usage clearly states otherwise. No one is forced to use a particular skin tone (they can continue using the default yellow one). This comment frankly is quite dismissive. Just because you don't use a feature doesn't mean "no one wanted it".
  - jessedhillon 5y ago
    Users follow prompts, so "people choose a race when presented with a racialized emoji picker" doesn't mean "people want their emojis racialized". It means, people understand what they are being asked to do, and want to get back to their business. You would need to have a theory of benefit, and then design a survey which tests users to understand if that benefit was achieved. You, frankly, are confused about causation -- we put a dialog in front of people and they made a selection, therefore people wanted this dialog?
    - andrewzah 5y ago
      "we put a dialog in front of people and they made a selection, therefore people wanted this dialog" You're suggesting that it's impossible for people to have wanted a feature, because UXs have a popup showing people that it's possible to use that feature now. I disagree. You're projecting your personal opinion as everyone's personal opinion. And that emoji picker still allows you to pick the default yellow color. So if people -really- didn't want to use them, they wouldn't.

hrjykrlfkfk 5y ago

Because it "erases Blackness and centers whiteness as a default", that's the standard answer. Yellow codes for the default, which is whiteness. Or said another way, white skin is the only unracialized skin color. Thus the supposedly neutral yellow stands for it.

virologist 5y ago
we are talking about yellow here. not black or white.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Yellow is a stand-in for "any skin tone".
- nobodywasishere 5y ago
  Yellow is stand-in for white
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Proof? Besides, we've got to have some sort of skin tone to stand for skin tones that are absent or not given for some reason. It's got to be _some_ colour, and it might as well be yellow.

Chris2048 5y ago

It's funny how gender-neutral terms where sought after, but we need alternatives to race-neutral emojis.

ceejayoz 5y ago
"We should have options to choose from" is a pretty consistent approach.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  Until someone chooses white, and potentially benefits from it.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    If using a white-skinned emoji gets you special treatment the yellow, brown, or black-skinned emoji does not, I think that's worth being concerned about. Until that happens, there are probably bigger fish to fry.

hrktb 5y ago

We can’t eternally keep the status quo just to avoid opening cans of worms. If we don’t intend to throw it away, we might as well open it and face the worms. This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null. But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.

fossuser 5y ago
I think skin tone color band aids are different, people have different skin tones and the old default only blended well on people with light skin so the new ones are nice for people. With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
- Timpy 5y ago
  I agree that it would be a more apt comparison if the original band-aid color where neon pink, or some other non-human-skin-tone.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Yeah - even then it’s not perfect because people in real life may have a cosmetic interest in skin tone matching bandages. It’s not about inserting race, it’s about blending the bandage so it looks nice. With emoji, it’s different - it’s explicitly about inserting race into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this type of thing is generally worse for society. It leads to people thinking about our differences more than our similarities.
- SamBam 5y ago
  > neutral non-racial thing But was it really? Serious question: Do you think that if the majority of people in the US, and particularly the majority of middle and upper classes and tech folk, were Black that they would have defaulted to a yellow color for emoji? That's not even getting into how all the "man" "woman" "child" etc emoji had stereotypical white-people hair etc.

lucretian 5y ago

> Introducing skin tone provided no advantage awfully confident take.

sim_card_map 5y ago

emojis was a mistake

kome 5y ago

> Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms. I 100% agree. But technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

Last fall, I found the plist files which control OS X's character picker, and spent an evening backporting seven years worth of new emojis to OS X 10.9 Mavericks[1]. The one thing I couldn't get working was skin tone variants, because Mavericks has no concept of them. All emojis in the picker are yellow. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got a really nasty email accusing me of being all sorts of racial things, because I hadn't included skin tones. I don't know if this person was just trolling or crazy or what, but they were really mad! I'd never received an email like this before, so I was pretty upset. 1: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emoji-picker.2260530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...

eplanit 5y ago
One complaint, from an irrationally upset person, can and should be ignored. It's way past time to stop giving power to the vocal minority.

teachingassist 5y ago

The Simpsons (partially serious). Coloring Black and Asian characters with skin tones, means that yellow in the Simpsons represents only white people.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
The Simpsons is not the authority on the meaning of yellow skin for generically representing human body parts. It’s a tv show. The iconic happy face symbol is not intended to specifically be a white person. Pac man is not a white person.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  I agree that they're not an -authority-, but the Simpsons is a huge cultural institution. They definitely made an impact on how the yellow tone is coded (as white). So yes it seems silly, but I think a default of blue or green would be better.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    This is a very North America centric view I think. The Simpsons aren't nearly as popular in other countries.
    - teachingassist 5y ago
      I tried to informally fact-check this and I found out (for example) that The Simpsons is dubbed into Luxembourgish.

sigzero 5y ago

Yes, we should have 100%.

batch12 5y ago

I don't have an issue with this-- if people find value in it, fine. I don't think I will use this though. There are too many combinations that I am too likely to get wrong.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

The appearance of skin tone emojis are bad enough but the thought that someone consciously took their time to choose the skin tone of the emoji that best matched their own in their mobile phone UI makes it that much more bad.

oblio 5y ago

I've seen plenty of people use a different emoji skin tone. So there was demand for it, you just never noticed it.

gwbas1c 5y ago

Or just 100% get rid of skin tone and use an outline of a hand.

kalleboo 5y ago
Yeah, in retrospect going from the original Docomo-style of emoji[0] to the more graphical ones[1] was a step back [0] https://emojipedia.org/docomo/ https://emojipedia.org/docomo/ [1] https://emojipedia.org/softbank/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/ edit: although to be fair to Softbank, it seems their initial color version had pink faces https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/

bonaldi 5y ago

Emojis communicate. Race of the speaker can add important context to the thing being communicated. Adding skin tone to emojis allows them to communicate this. With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation. TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.

f1refly 5y ago
what could you possibly add to a debate that is altered by an emphasis your skin tone before you bring it up?
- bonaldi 5y ago
  I'm slightly amazed that nobody sees any value in being able to talk about race using a full range of expression. The wave-hand emoji with a black colour allows you to compactly say "+1 as a black person", for example. That means emojis now support conversations about race. I've seen it used exactly like this in the wild in multiple fora.
  - f1refly 5y ago
    Yes, exactly. My point is why it is important what colour your skin is. Are there arguments that are only valid because someone is white? Isn't that racist?
    - bonaldi 5y ago
      Why is it important to be able to talk about what colour your skin is? Have you lived through the past year? There is more to language than debate-club argumentation, too. Consider - why is it important what gender someone is? Or age? Should emoji only have had unisex and age-less figures instead of its current set? Is it sexist to use a female-presenting emoji? These things all have obvious utility for communication, and you're ending up making some deeply strange arguments to try and dismiss that utility.

dkla 5y ago

Because the "left" pushes for racial segregation again (at least mentally), starting with pre-schoolers.

fsociety 5y ago

It is so people can express themselves with emojis that represent their own skin color. Seems important, no?

layoutIfNeeded 5y ago

Because Americans are obsessed with skin color.

moate 5y ago
Yes, Americans invented the Cotton Gin and Racism around the same time, and no other culture ever has cared at all about representation or inclusion./s I doubt this was solely Americans or that Americans are the only group of people that care about race/ethnicity. Maybe your findings are different. Please let me know where to find your publishings.
- layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
  Yikes! Like I said, obsessed... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There are way more ethnicities and races than skin colors. E.g. there are hundreds of distinct ethnicities in Europe that Americans would merrily categorize as "white" based on their obsession with melanin.
  - moate 5y ago
    I don't understand your thesis. Only Americans care about race? Only Americans homogenize outside cultures? I mean you just rolled a country large enough to encompass 30 different European countries, where over 300 different languages are spoken into a single cultural belief system, but go off sis... Your point: There are more races/ethnicities than skin colors would show exactly why it should be relatively simple to undertake this project: a black person from the US, Congo, or the Dominican Republic could all use the same emoji. I get that you seem to be here exclusively to dunk on ugly American, but I don't think caring about race is something exclusive to the US. If you're from Europe, remember: we learned it from watching you dad.

planb 5y ago

You could argue the same for gendered emojis.

gumby 5y ago

Why shouldn’t people have a way to express themselves that they want? Are there words or spellings that computers should refuse to display? I am not a fan of how Unicode has treated emojis, but there is no question they are completely within scope in principle (they were part of extant keitai character sets) though the way they are being extended by the UCS makes me uncomfortable. But so what? People like to use them which seems like enough justification.

crumbshot 5y ago

> Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages. After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-rept.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-re... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf Based on this, the Consortium refined it into their own proposal that used the Fitzpatrick scale for skin tone modifiers: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf And then, eventually, these were included in Unicode 8.0.

hnnnnnnng 5y ago
I find it offensive that they don't offer a color that is close to my skin color.

baggy_trough 5y ago

Yellow is ugly.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

unicode itself is a terrible can of worms. There are so many edge cases that adding black emojis is hardly a big deal. Black emojis is not complicated compared to some of the languages out there.

akomtu 5y ago

You'd be fired for this comment in any big american corp today. The big players in the US have been pushing a new version of the divide&conquer agenda to the poor so they wouldn't accidentally develop class conscience. Basically, most Americans are being divided along the gender and race lines: men vs women vs trans, and white vs black vs asian vs latino. The goal must be dividing the society into a few tens of alienated camps that don't talk to each other. This policy is being pushed hard at every level: from schools and offices, to DoD and WH. It's pretty much an awkward religion or rather a cult, with church, heresy, bishops and inquisition.