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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
- egypturnash 2y ago“Oh no the attempted murder of Jonald Chump was going too far, we need to cook down the discourse!” - every politician and pundit “I want Twitter’s gun emoji to look like a real gun instead of a wussy toy!” - Elmo Munk
- londons_explore 2y agoHow do they technically implement this? Custom font? Or replace every emoji with an <img tag?
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoyou can use a custom font for your site that includes glyphs for the characters you need (eg: a gun).
- ronsor 2y agoModern emojis are stored as fonts.
- skrebbel 2y agoThis is nonsense. A complete custom emoji font is something like 10MB. Shipping that to every website visitor is obscenely wasteful. This is why sites either just use native emojis, which all OSes support reasonably well by now, or download a little SVG for every emoji used.
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoCustom font is sensible fwiw. You can have a font with a single glyph implemented and you’ll override just that glyph, falling back to other fonts for the non implemented glyphs. This is why sites often have a list of fonts and not just one in the css. It’s also how other languages are supported. No Thai chars in your font? We just fall back until we hit a font with those glyphs available (might be an os level font rather than a site specified font but that’s fine). I’d hate to try and hack a “intercept the text and add an image” type of system when the font rendering system has a trivial way to override individual glyphs already.
- londons_explore 2y ago> This is why sites often have a list of fonts Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoThe ones that are single/small subset glyph are fine since it’s a few bytes and very cacheable and then the others in the list are usually the well known font types “arial” etc. which don’t even need the site to supply a new font file (you can specify fonts in css with a file or simply a name of a common font/font family). So no real issue at all.
- kevingadd 2y agoTwitter has had custom images for emoji for years, the set was/is called Twemoji. This allowed them to have consistent rendering across platforms.
- ascorbic 2y agoThey're SVGs in img tags. This is the new one: https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/1f52b.1465b29a.svg https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/1f52b.1465b2...
- whalesalad 2y agoI wish that websites would stop overriding the emoji icons and just use the platform default.
- paxys 2y agoFun fact – Apple will reject your app for using emojis in an unapproved way, for example as a UI element, button or reaction. Default system emojis can only be used within regular text. For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's.
- Someone 2y ago> For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's. You can use SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/sf-symbols https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...: “You can use a symbol to convey an object or concept wherever interface icons can appear, such as in navigation bars, toolbars, tab bars, context menus, and within text”). That would not use Apple’s emojis, but wouldn’t require you to create your own versions.
- gruez 2y ago>Apple will reject your app for using emojis in an unapproved way, for example as a UI element, button or reaction Source? Signal seems to be using the native emojis for reacts, and they don't seem to be having issues.
- gjstein 2y agoDoesn't Slack violate that constraint? Slack allows (or at least seems to) using iOS system emoji to respond to messages.
- EasyMark 2y agoyou can't use a vector image of the emoticon (if you like it) ?
- tonymet 2y agoIn general I would agree, but the platforms have also censored the gun emoji with the water gun .
- moralestapia 2y agoIt's interesting that Microsoft started with a toy gun, then someone around 2015-2016 made the decision to turn it into a real gun.
- bena 2y agoI noticed that too. If I had to guess, and I don't, I'd say they changed just to be in line with everyone else. Although I wish they would have gone back to the ray gun as a sort of "told you so".
- Gare 2y agoThere is pressure to standardize the "feel" of an emoji because otherwise miscommunication can occur between users of different platforms/emoji fonts.
- klyrs 2y agoYeah but going the other way is political.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- einpoklum 2y agoI like the Samsung 2018 design where you can't really understand if it's a toy or a futuristic ray gun. ... but more than that, I don't like how they keep playing with those designs all the time.
- rightbyte 2y agoYe. Emojis that render differently for different people do not work. It conveys the wrong emotions. I had this half year when I though my mother was constantly pissed at me becouse she sent these angry devil robots to me. It turned out it was the default emoji font on my phone and all my friends used text based emojis so I didn't notice. A real pistol and a water pistol send totally different vibes...
- sickofparadox 2y agoA more elegant emoji, from a more civilized age.
- hangonhn 2y agoWow. Microsoft's original version was a pretty good compromise. (they used a futuristic blaster icon)
- legitster 2y agoIt's kind of funny that Microsoft was ahead of the time, changed it back to match other libraries, and then changed it again to keep up. Just can't win.
- nebula8804 2y agoWe are seeing the design of their corporate structure in action heh
- chrisco255 2y agoVery inclusive of the Martian audience.
- tills13 2y agoWow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.
- bastawhiz 2y agoMy thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).
- yacine_ 2y agolmao you really think this took me more than 15 minutes to do?
- meroes 2y agoBased on the number of bugs and difficulty X had doing anything in the first months after Elon come over, yes.
- bastawhiz 2y agoSounds like you've got so much to do
- not_wyoming 2y agoStill 15 minutes fixing something that wasn't broken instead of generating revenue or cutting costs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit - and another 10 defending the decision on HackerNews forums
- paxys 2y agoThis is sure to fix all their problems
- janandonly 2y agoIt looks as if Twitter could easily fire some more people and still keep operations up .
- voidfunc 2y agoSo edgy. Must be peak edgelords working at Twitter these days.
- DrDimension 2y ago[flagged]
- popcalc 2y ago[flagged]
- obsetracomism 2y agoIt was a goatse appreciation comment, surely.
- soupbowl 2y agoThe fact that the emoji was "censored" to begin with is weird to me. But the internet is weird and now people will be getting banned from X for using gun emojis to promote political violence.
- theultdev 2y agoI found it alarming that the meaning of previous texts between many people could be altered by simply changing the glyph of an emote. And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best. What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions. I'm very much against it. It's the same or worse than altering the text content of a message. Once you put an emoji symbol out there for a character code and it's agreed upon, it should be immutable.
- Bluestein 2y agoNext up, "semantic sanitation" by AI.- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. More in line with doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. Doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. You're doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. Doubleplusgoodthink".- "Doubleplusgood".-
- sharkjacobs 2y agoThis is exactly as stupid as changing it to a water pistol in the first place was
- tonymet 2y agothat can't possibly be true. this is the original
- NickM 2y agoYeah, stuff like this just should not ever be changed in this way, IMO. It shouldn't have been changed in the first place, but two wrongs don't make a right either, it just makes the problem even worse. If we have older communications that use an emoji, it can retroactively edit the meaning if that emoji renders to a fundamentally different object than it used to, so this kind of change has the side effect of rewriting history unless people take extra care to only use fonts that match the age of the document. It's already hard enough to communicate clearly and effectively in the modern world without having the rug pulled out from under us with stuff like this.
- y04nn 2y agoIndeed, this is very 1984. Changing the meaning of a word, people express their thoughts with emojis, the meaning (representation in this case) should never be altered in such way.
- edwinjm 2y agoWhy do you want a real gun? I bet most uses are to bully people. It seems that's the kind of social network Elon wants.
- bombcar 2y agoBullying will occur no matter what emojis are available - even if you have to use 𓂺 or similar. Various knives are available if you want it, so if anything we should add MORE emojis (gun combining character something else = various types of gun, say). In fact, it's easier to have one "known bad" emoji to check than having hundreds to look at.
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- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoGreat to see this change. The decision to get rid of the gun emoji was itself an act of political activism, highlighting the left leaning bias in many of these organizations - or at least the power given to the voices that pushed for those changes. It was a naked way to influence the culture around guns, and make them less visible. But it also killed funny uses of the actual pistol emoji. For the record, the underlying Unicode name is “PISTOL” - not squirt gun or ray gun or whatever. I also think that as harmless as a change from a pistol to ray gun might seem, it is a signal of how far these companies will go to push one particular ideology onto everyone - its employees, customers, etc. These large tech platforms are too powerful and influential to be allowed that kind of deep and far-reaching influence on our politics and culture, and they should behave neutrally as much as possible.
- WheatMillington 2y ago[flagged]
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- jeffgreco 2y ago[flagged]
- whycome 2y agoIts slow, but I'm pretty sure Unicode updated name. https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html #1121
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThe most recent Unicode standard (https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf) still names it "PISTOL", although the official locale data designates "water pistol" as the short name in English and most other languages.
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- MisterTea 2y agoThe water pistol is an analog of a real gun no matter how silly they are shaped. Growing up most of the plastic guns were models of the Colt M1911 and other semi automatic pistols. As a kid you knew what you were emulating: shooting a real gun at someone. Hell, Cowboys and Indians is a fucked up game for kids used to play. Even the comical looking ray gun is a futuristic energy weapon that is usually depicted as being more devastating than a projectile weapon by burning or vaporizing flesh - totally harmless fun! Guns are guns. Stop trying to pretend water pistols are somehow harmless images.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 2y agoDoes this retroactively change the meaning of the emoji people used, or is it only applying to future use of the emoji? (That would be a fun legal hypothetical.)
- mcdonje 2y agoThe rendering of a glyph for a code point would have to be global.
- postepowanieadm 2y agoImagine someone sending a water gun and another person receiving a real gun.
- chrisco255 2y agoI grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market are things like Call of Duty where you blast people away with automatic machine guns and sniper rifle head shots. It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoI'm not convinced this is a liberal vs. conservative thing in the first place. It seems like a straightforward continuation of the trend: depictions of violence are popular in some circles, yet disreputable in others, so big corporations looking to serve both markets have to find awkward, stodgy compromises to try and keep everyone happy.
- bluescrn 2y agoIt's all pretty silly. We're arguing over a gun emoji on social media, where all sorts of horrific videos are posted, including real people getting shot by real guns.
- paxys 2y agoEvery side is pro censorship, just when it suits them the most. Look at all the book bans across conservative states, for example.
- chrisco255 2y agoThe book bans are only primary school libraries. I think this is fine, K-12 is mandatory, so clearly the state and local districts should have influence over what's allowed there. There's restrictions on religious teachings in school and likewise there should be limits on opinionated secular topics that don't advance reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. There's plenty of exposure to that stuff via other channels.
- xyst 2y agoIs this part of new twitter management to "destroy the woke mind virus"? Yikes. Buddy's mind has wondered off to the hadal zone. Well beyond the point of "no return".
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI don’t know if I would choose to use the phrase ‘woke mind virus’ myself, but it does seem highly suspicious that a bunch of tech companies, all known for their very clear political biases, decided to change the meaning and symbolism of the “PISTOL” Unicode emoji in a short time frame. To me that was indeed an act of “woke” political activism and pressure, and it seems to have spread to many companies quickly. All to suppress people from sharing their ideas in an uncensored way, which is just a ridiculous thing for operating systems and social media platforms to do. So the phrase doesn’t exactly seem wrong in its criticism?
- zb3 2y agoVery good. Emoji censorship is ridiculous
- edwinjm 2y ago[flagged]
- retrocryptid 2y agono. us rednecks like real firearms.
- retrocryptid 2y agoIs it me or does that emoji look a little more like a Ruger SR9 than a Colt M1911? I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.
- yacine_ 2y agoyeah its a pretty bad job. i never held a gun in real life and they kind of scare me tbh
- plorg 2y agoIt's also, contra the twitterer, not reverting to the ur-glyph, which, in it's original form at the 6 major mentioned companies, was a revolver. None of those vendors have previously depicted the pistol emoji as a contemporary handgun.
- relaxing 2y agoIt copies the reference standard, which you are specifically not supposed to copy.
- AdamH12113 2y agoA hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.
- gruez 2y ago>A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
- AdamH12113 2y agoSure, meaning always depends on context, but this is a lower-level difference. If I copy an English sentence from a hundred-year-old book into Microsoft Word, it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. If I write a sentence containing emojis on e.g. an Android phone and read that exact bitwise-equivalent text string on an Apple phone on the same day, it could have a wildly different meaning because of the font. This has already happened -- a few years ago Apple updated their font to have colored foot emojis, which sparked some controversy[1] because the version of the feet for black skin tones (incorrectly) depicted the sole of the foot as black. There was a thread on Twitter (can't find a link, sadly) where someone was confused by the posts talking about this because their Android phone's version of the emoji showed a side view of a foot instead of a bottom view. The original tweet was unintelligible to this reader because they were using a different font than the writer. One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-outraged-Apples-new-feet-emojis.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...
- drivingmenuts 2y agoXitterbros gonna xitterbro. Im sort of surprised this didn't happen Day One. I guess Elon overlooked that.
- Eumenes 2y ago[flagged]
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- xg15 2y agoThis seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them? In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.
- delichon 2y agoDisagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.
- deanCommie 2y agoThe question isn't whether it was OK to turn the gun emoji into a water pistol in the first place. It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent. The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this. Having X "go back" because the original change was "unjust" doesn't fix the underlying problem. It creates a new one. Literally perfect application of the concept of "two wrongs don't make a right"
- llm_trw 2y agoA bunch of busy bodies decided to change the meaning of a unicode character: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f52b/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f52b/index.ht... This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.
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- ProfessorZoom 2y agocrazy how much drama ONE employee at X can stir up just because they felt like changing it
- throw7 2y agoThat's good. Shouldn't have changed to begin with. If Apple wanted a water pistol they should have gone through the process to add a new one. On the other hand, the IOC just added E-sports to the olympics. No shooter games allowed.
- jryan49 2y agoX/Elon just does this stuff to stay in the news, we should just start ignoring it...
- m3kw9 2y agoYou can see when they all went woke. Guns emojis bad, next is knives.
- listless 2y agoThis from a guy who unveils his new data center at exactly 420 and has a line of cars intentionally named to spell out “s3xy” and the reason we’re all forced to say “space sex” out loud every time we talk about a rocket launch. We are trapped in a meme.
- xg15 2y agoWhat do you expect if society is hellbound to concentrate all power but none of the responsibility into the hands of a few billionaires and one of them happens to identify as a 13 year old memelord?
- maxwell 2y ago"Comedy should be illegal again."
- roflyear 2y agoWhat a ridiculous overreaction: people are allowed to criticize his poor taste. Unless you want free speech to be "illegal again"
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- mardifoufs 2y agoI agree about his general poor taste, but what's the poor taste in this case? That they didn't want to use a silly water gun anymore?
- seanw444 2y agoAgreed. I'm sick of people I disagree with having fun.
- kortilla 2y ago> forced to say “space sex” out loud Unless your spoken English isn’t very good, it’s quite clear there is no “s” sound in the second half. Say “space sex” out loud and yes you’ll hear two distinct ‘s’ sounds. Not at all the same as “space ex”.
- nemomarx 2y agoWhy aren't emojis just part of your font or customizable? I'd love to mod mine back into the old Google blobs
- alephnerd 2y ago<Meta Question/Observation about HN> I've noticed that culture war type conversations have become completely normalized on HN after the COVID pandemic. These kinds of discussions never change any minds and are just a toxic cesspit of online commentators arguing against each other. Why hasn't HN considered limiting these kinds of conversations. Almost 2-3 times every week I notice some kind of topic like this arising on HN, and infecting other conversations on the platform. Furthermore, I have notice significant traction from accounts created post-2020 on these kinds of discussions unlike other discussions on HN.
- archagon 2y agoSee also: "Elon Musk's X adds pro-Trump icons for Trump hashtags" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020124) Twitter is just a barely disguised Truth Social now.
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- pnathan 2y agoI have always found the :pistol: -> water gun thing to be a great example of corporate NewSpeak in the service of some ideology. If you mean a pistol, it should be a pistol. If you mean a water gun, it should be a water gun. Having both icons seems perfectly fine. So I rather like this change: it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning. Also, as another commentator points out, the relevant Unicode symbol definition image is an actual pistol. anyway, a bit of a molehill to get riled up about. I have a mountain of code to climb. Ta!
- srid 2y ago| it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning Indeed, this is the key point that everybody should be focusing on.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lazzlazzlazz 2y agoThe emoji is actually "Pistol" or "Gun" in the Unicode standard. It was originally represented as a real gun, but — for lack of a better term — activists chose to reinterpret it. If people want a "Water Pistol" or "Water Gun" emoji there should be one!
- yamumsahoe 2y agothis species really find time to fight about everything.
- _bkyr 2y agoIt amazes me that this discussion is so heated instead of a topic like X (and most other social platforms) requiring you to have an account to see anything. X only exists because of users contributions, but almost all of them have decided to lock it behind a paywall.
- whatindaheck 2y agoI’m so tired of these culture wars. The whole censorship of the original emoji was incredibly pointless and stupid. Now we have to rehash this all over again and I’ll have to hear about it. And this time, with Elon behind it, people are going to be even more uppity about whichever position you take. It’s insane to even feel pressured to take a position on a friggin hieroglyph. And both sides will argue that it’s the other side making it political. No wonder I’m on Prozac.
- oehpr 2y agoOK. I have a modest proposal: Anyone can use any emoji they want. To achieve this users declare emoji's in a known format the browser recognizes inline in text, which includes a content hash of the emoji they wish to use. eg. ":T15PXExNem0xX:" Browsers use a DHT and local emoji datastore looking to the DHT to fetch any emoji's seen in text but not present locally. You may submit a picture to your browser to create an emoji, but it must be a 128x128 webp image. The browser calculates the hash, and puts it in your local datastore. You may now use this emoji anywhere. A few things to think through here: 1. Would be nice to have an non profit come forward and make a nice big server act as a reliable hub to the emoji database. The nice thing is, basically anyone can step forward at any time and provide servers to the network. Anyone can serve the emoji to anyone as they are addressed by their hash. 2. Regarding offensive or hateful emoji's, I think the question "What if this is used to promote hate?" Is a good question to be asking. But try to keep in mind that the system I am outlining is meant to be communication infrastructure, not a platform. Think of it like a different way to write text. This system in and of itself isn't a platform at all, as the only way to discover and use emoji's is to see someone use it somewhere else. You can browse your local datastore, but that's it. 3. What about REALLY hateful or outright illegal content? IPFS is a guiding light here (in more ways than one if people are familiar with the project). Lists can be made of Violating content by third party organizations and browsers could be configured to subscribe to those lists, very similar to the way ad blocking networks work. Apparatus could be constructed from there to support DMCA and abuse reports and distribute block lists. These subscription lists are user configurable, in case those apparatus are captured or abused and users feel the need to revolt. Likely more issues than this? I don't think there's anything that is insurmountable. But that's the rough outline. Instead of relying on the unicode consortium, take advantage of content hashing distribution networks to create user defined emoji's instead. I think about a system a lot when stuff like this comes up. Because I ask, what would be the most popular examples in such a database look like? Do we think it would be close to what the unicode consortium laid out?
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- incomingpain 2y agoIt should be a firearm. The illegal collusion as described in the article should be punished.
- myfonj 2y agoCould the word "gun" be added to the title, so it would come up in HN search for the query "gun emoji", please? Something like X redesigns Water Pistol "gun" Emoji back to a firearm would be ideal. --- BTW, what is the reason this post is currently [flagged]? I almost (re-)posted it myself (since I've sloppily searched for that "gun emoji" instead of the URL what returned zero results for this week), because I find it interesting especially from the technical and "semiotical" point of view. I see it is somewhat political topic as well, it even might be covered on the TV eventually (?), but I think other HN relevant aspects overweight that.
- NoGravitas 2y agoThe question in my mind is why Twitter even should be using its own emoji set at all. Seems like it should either be up to the operating system vendor or the user what font they use for emoji.