5 ms·

This 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 Unico

• delichon 2y ago
  Disagree. 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      A 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.
      • xg15 2y ago
        Exactly, so then it would be wise not to add to the damage already done by changing it again.
        • llm_trw 2y ago
          The unicode spec has always, and will always, have it as a pistol. Stop destroying standards because they hurt your feelings.
        • Gormo 2y ago
          It's a potential deterrent to future attempts to change the meaning/rendering of existing characters.
        • Gormo 2y ago
          I'm not sure that's necessarily wise, since the underlying takeaway is that it's fine to attempt to change the meaning or rendering of pre-existing symbols as long as you get away with it. The threat of having the change you are attempting to force be contested over a long period of time should, hopefully, act as a deterrent to such behavior.
    • nebula8804 2y ago
      You have to stand for something and Musk is someone who continually shoots his foot for his beliefs. Probably does not matter to him if no one follows (although now that I know the history, everyone should have pushed back in 2016 but the second best time is to push back now)
  • aquova 2y ago
    The bizarre state of this emoji was that it already faced this change. One vendor (Apple I believe) decided to make it a water gun, slowly the rest of the industry followed, officially changing its name to "water pistol". Now the old battles are new again.
    • forgotpwd16 2y ago
      The official name still is just "pistol" (and even more the latest Unicode standard specifies it as handgun, revolver). Not sure how Emojipedia decides on used name (seems to follow Apple) but (in this case at least) isn't using the standard one.
  • xg15 2y ago
    I would extend "the same thing everywhere" through time as well, i.e. it's a bad thing to ever change the meaning of an emoji after it's been published, for the obvious reason that this messes with old texts and all other locations where the emoji has been used with the old meaning. This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back to the original meaning now is just as bad - it will just disrupt in the same way lots of newer texts that assume the glyph is a water pistol.
    • Muromec 2y ago
      It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture. Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.
      • xg15 2y ago
        There are different ways how languages can change. A language changes organically, if individual people simply talk differently than their predecessors, out of convenience, without any specific intent or plan behind it. That's the way languages have always changed throughout history and keep changing. Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power. Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think. But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.
        • Muromec 2y ago
          >pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of. Chairman Mao enters the chat
      • 2y ago
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    This would still happen with or without the platforms doing it. Like any other piece of language, emoji will change meaning over time or between groups, and make it hard to read other group's texts. For a current example, if you see a text saying "I loved your <eggplant emoji>", it can have at least two very different, but quite common meanings (either liking some eggplant based food, or a sexual allusion).
• MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  > 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. It used to be a real gun everywhere, until the schoolmarms started chiming in. It is supposed to be one, no matter what the ministry of truth thinks it should be replaced with. > drama, shitstorms On X? How will they ever recover.
• qsort 2y ago
  This is why I believe including emoji in unicode was a blunder. A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial. On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the "font". The whole thing about flags and skin tones are symptoms of the same problem.
  • kremi 2y ago
    I’m pretty sure the thumbs up emoji or the slightly smiling emoji won’t get different interpretations based on font. And here the issue is not in font differences (or different pictures of the same thing getting different interpretations): it’s the thing represented that’s actually different.
    • jorvi 2y ago
      In the earlier days of emojis, some Samsung or blob emojis definitely look different enough from Apple emojis that it caused confusion..
  • sangnoir 2y ago
    > A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial Many typefaces are have problematic I/l/1 and O/0 characters, and that is material enough that applications avoid those characters entirely to avoid potential confusion. The problem is deeper than unicode: the fact that any codepoints can be rendered differently from client to client or typeface-to-typeface was always problematic, even back it was mostly ASCII.
  • ploxiln 2y ago
    Even more, fonts having multiple colors in a glyph was a huge complexity explosion for font rendering, for terminals, and more. You can see a very quick technical summary of different ways of encoding colors in fonts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Color_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Color_fonts But anyway, images should have remained separate things, png or whatever. Fonts rendering is complex enough with complex scripts e.g. Arabic, but that is the domain of fonts/shaping/rendering. Such a hugely expensive technical mess because people want their stupid color emojis.
• nottorp 2y ago
  I always thought the purpose of a standard set of emoji is to keep the Unicode commitee employed... If you don't have a heated debate about the meaning of the dot over the poop emoji every year they may find themselves out of a job and that would be too productive.
• photonthug 2y ago
  > This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. My first thought exactly. My 2nd thought, glancing at the graphic of like 6 years and 6 companies and the evolution of the emoji.. there's a nontrivial amount of money thrown at all this "work", and once you think about all the meetings and emails and design iterations, the opinion pieces on the result, etc, the frivolous spend for this kind of nonsense is probably in the millions. Not to mention all of us taking a media break while we're on the clock! No real political sentiment even needs to be involved.. all this probably just represents make-work activity by folks looking to justify their continued employment. The political aspect is just the hook, since the bike-shedding after that is guaranteed.
• roughly 2y ago
  It does have the benefit of making whatever X users decide to do with the gun look appropriately silly everywhere else.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Emojis lost the plot when they became too anthropomorphic. Now that they're realistic humanoids they need to represent all skin types, genders, ages, pregnant men, etc. A smiley doesn't need gender, sex, or age, to convey meaning.
  • xg15 2y ago
    I'm with you on that one. I think that was an indicator of how political sentiment and goals seems to have shifted at one point from "reconcile differences and eventually just feel as one human race" to "emphasize differences and pledge allegiance to whatever group I belong to".
• nebula8804 2y ago
  I wonder if there was a way for other clients to detect apple and translate their 'watergun' into a new emoji while keeping backwards compatibility on all other clients. Or another way for all vendors to push back against Apple is for all agree to not render the new emoji from Apple devices. Its too late now but one of these two would have been a good solution in 2016 to push back against Apple's nonsense. I guess since this is also used in SMS there is no way to properly detect the client its coming from?
  • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    It’s just a typeface and a Unicode character the client decides how it’s displayed An iPhone 1 would display a gun still.
• DavidVoid 2y ago
  It's not exactly something new though. Windows still doesn't have a native implementation of country flags.
• Lerc 2y ago
  As a counterpoint, imagine if there was an emoji that displayed as a swastika to the typer but as a bunch of pretty flowers to everyone else. I think that has potential for hilarity. It would certainly soften the impact of a certain group of imbeciles.
• Alupis 2y ago
  > This 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else undoes the change and suddenly now they're blamed for waging a political battle! We see this elsewhere too. Github with master -> main, despite master remaining the default everywhere else and causing endless confusion with examples/tutorials all over the internet. Immigrants -> Migrants, voting laws returning to pre-covid rules (and being likened to Jim Crow on Steroids as a result), etc. There's a segment of society that's in love with renaming/changing things everyone else was fine with, and then when people try to change things back - they're attacked as radical political warmongers.
  • cmiles74 2y ago
    The phrase "small group of people" is doing a lot of work, I think. We had the largest technology/media companies in the country making similar changes.
    • Alupis 2y ago
      The reality is a small handful of people - or even one person - makes these decisions. Nonetheless, even if we were to believe 100% of the people at Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al decided on this change together, it's still a small group of people and it still is a political decision.
    • bathtub365 2y ago
      All of the employees of all of those companies combined are still a small group of people compared to the number subjected to the results of their decisions.
    • bitcharmer 2y ago
      Let's not fool ourselves, these changes are almost exclusively pushed by small but very vocal minority groups and SJWs
• labcomputer 2y ago
  > 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? Maybe? I mean, Unicode already explicitly does not encode glyphs, but code points. So point 65 is capital Roman “A”, but Unicode says nothing about how it should be displayed. Going further, certain code points represent characters which Unicode considers “the same” character in Japanese/Chinese/Korean even though they may be different in meaning, pronunciation, and visual appearance. Thus, you need to know which language is being writing before you can pick the correct glyph to put on the screen. So, while stupid, it doesn’t seem exactly wrong or unprecedented for X to change their glyph from a squirt gun to a pistol.
• mardifoufs 2y ago
  This change started with Apple changing the emoji from a handgun to a water pistol out of the blue. I don't see the issue with another platform deciding they don't want that change, or preferring another style. The representation itself isn't standardized I think, a lot of emojis don't look very similar across different platforms.
• whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Speaking objectively it’s either dumb or it matters. There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is… The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb. These dumbest of political battlegrounds are entirely the problem caused by the people who demanded the initial change, no one cared about this till someone cared about it.
  • philistine 2y ago
    I bet you more people prefer the water gun. Two opinions are not automatically equal. Especially with anything regarding languages, a consensus is to be respected.
    • porkbeer 2y ago
      Infantalizing tools of violence, or re-inforcing gun toys for kids, there is no good argument for the w'squirt gun.
    • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      > I bet you more people prefer the water gun Depends where your sample is from, if you just did a worldwide the result would surprise you.