Ask HN: Why can’t I use emojis on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31322320

by elpakal • 4 years ago

10 27 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

omosubi• 4 years ago

Cause people will abuse it and and a dozen 100 emojis to their messages - please keep the status quo

plaguepilled• 4 years ago

You fear emoji because of their immense power. :0

me1337• 4 years ago

This behavior is by design

elpakal• 4 years ago

Obviously, but why?

DamnYuppie• 4 years ago

If you have to ask there is no way I would want you to be able to use emojis!

usrn2• 4 years ago

They're typographically awful and they're unprofessional.

walrus01• 4 years ago

Do like we did in the bbs era and pre Unicode emoji standard and use ascii compliant smilies

tintedfireglass2• 4 years ago

Looks like reddit is leaking here lmao

notsound• 4 years ago

This is very accurate. Hopefully everyone is chill and explains their reasoning.

speedgoose• 4 years ago

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

The HN guidelines.

tintedfireglass2• 4 years ago

Oh sorry for that, didn't realize.

cttet• 4 years ago

It have colours. Which is too much of visual stimulation IMO. I am OK if they are black and white.

moistly• 4 years ago

Because it’s expected that you’re smart enough to use your words.

asddubs• 4 years ago

maybe they're using utf8_unicode_ci instead of utf8mb4_unicode_ci on their mysql database :P

it's probably a manual filter

usrn2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure they're writing s-expressions to disk but maybe things have evolved since I last looked.

News-Dog• 4 years ago

There are good security reasons, among others to filter some unicode;

Homoglyph : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

UniCode 'Confusables' Visual-Spoofing : https://unicode.org/reports/tr36/#visual_spoofing

The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor : https://certitude.consulting/blog/en/invisible-backdoor/

There are many other characters that look similar to the ones used in code which may be used for such proposes,

  (e.g. “／”, “−”, “＋”, “⩵”, “”, “⫽”, “꓿”, “∗”). Unicode calls these characters “confusables”.<*

chitowneats• 4 years ago

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

freedomben• 4 years ago

As you can see from the reaction to your question, a lot of users view lack of emoji as a feature rather than a bug. HN is known for being a very simple, text-based site. HN is viewed by many as one of the last bastion of the old internet, and adding emoji would be likely to result in forks and a civil war. I would imagine that adding emoji is a very low priority, if not an intentional design.

derbOac• 4 years ago

I don't miss emojis on the site but there is something to be said for the idea of HN being fully Unicode compliant, consequences be damned.

krapp• 4 years ago

Hacker News doesn't even comply with the barely extant layout standards of the early web that it emulates, and the anti-modern contrarian establishment here is weirdly proud of it.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

Because we'd like to keep hacker news from slowly devolving into its lesser gifted cousin Reddit.

errantmind• 4 years ago

It is too late for that.

boppo12• 4 years ago

It's not that bad yet.

thomassmith65• 4 years ago

I don't want to play 'guess what this means' when I read comments here. I'm too old to waste time figuring out if someone is talking about an eggplant or a phallus, etc.

Let other sites cater to people who want to post memes and emojis. I doubt their lack irritates people who like them nearly as much as their presence irritates people who do not.

beanlog• 4 years ago

I think the main problem is that they're too attention grabbing. Especially in a UI in HN where everything else is plain text, an emoji would have so much visual weight your eyes would have trouble focusing on anything else on the page. Forbidding such visual grenades helps keep the focus on the content.

boppo12• 4 years ago

I'm not trying to be mean, but if you think emojis would be appropriate here, I don't think you understand the site you're on.

Ask HN: Why can’t I use emojis on HN?

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