Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/tomorrows-emoji-today-unicode-170

by ChrisArchitect • 11 months ago

205 376 11 months ago

jenniferdaniel.substack.com

iamtedd2• 11 months ago

Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard that is more or less agnostic to each language (is universally painful to work with), and yet they talk about the rollout in terms that only make sense to the northern hemisphere (seasons).

bbor3• 11 months ago

I mean this is just some blog, no? I guess quarters are technically a bit more inclusive, but it seems like small beans IMHO — the 12% of humanity living south of the equator is likely used to this sorta thing.

Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?

iamtedd2• 11 months ago

I missed that it's a "personal" blog, but they prominently describe their position as the emoji subcommittee chair, so it's more or less an official outlet.

Northern bias, yes. What about emoji or Unicode is tied to the weather? Why not use more universal time markers? If dates or months are truly too precise for this timeline, quarters are good enough. They could also just have a month range or "approx".

Being near the equator (whether northern side or southern), I don't have an innate sense of seasons at all, so have to remember what people are referring to when they use these terms.

mikepurvis• 11 months ago

I like how SkillUp handles it in the This Week In Videogames show when talking about release days; basically says "northern summer" which acknowledges that the publisher said summer while clarifying whose summer it actually is (eg, not his, since he's Australia-based).

chucksmash• 11 months ago

U+1F921

a_shovel• 11 months ago

Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.

bsimpson2• 11 months ago

Reminds me of World of Goo.

I played it on Wii, but you can play it on your phone or computer too:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/22000/World_of_Goo/

jzymbaluk• 11 months ago

Me and my friends call him (the Open Eye Crying Laughing Face) Rolf. Would love it if Rolf made it into Unicode

Zee2• 11 months ago

It’s always been Craugh for me.

wpm• 11 months ago

I know that would as "loel" face

bbor3• 11 months ago

As much as I want HN to finally support markdown, I really want them to end the baffling anti-emoji stance. They’re adorable, versatile, fun, and useful - the only reason to ban them from forum comments is banal distaste for the new.

Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3

More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.

pcthrowaway• 11 months ago

As a rock climber I anticipate wanting to use the rockfall emoji (not landslide) much more frequently than the sasquatch, though it depends how wild my climbing adventures get

bbor3• 11 months ago

In glad someone is excited for it!

I’ve done a bit of climbing, and I guess I’m just struggling to imagine using it… rocks falling is either not a big enough deal to text about (cause we’re all following safety guidelines by wearing helmets, right?), or way too big of a deal to make light of with an emoji. The latter case applies even more so in cases where the rocks hit buildings.

The only situations I can imagine are a) “im gonna be late, the road is blocked by rockfall” and b) “couldn’t go skiing this weekend, an avalanche closed the slope”. But maybe two is enough! And who knows, maybe it’ll be interpreted as “collapse” in general, which is broadly useful obviously.

dfee• 11 months ago

I’d imagine - depending on your location - you might need to quickly text out a Sasquatch emoji from a perch on a climb.

After all, Sasquatch live near many rock climbing destinations. https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp

nulld3v• 11 months ago

Feels like there is something missing every time I use a forum that doesn't support phpBB smilies.

bmacho• 11 months ago

Here are some ascii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:

lifthrasiir7• 11 months ago

I think HN should allow emojis but strip all colors out of them. Colors are what often makes emojis so annoying---without them they are just another characters.

arduanika2• 11 months ago

Eh, it's just one of the ways that HN tries to keep it pg.

Biganon2• 11 months ago

Very good pun, if intended

qingcharles• 10 months ago

I use emojis like a fiend, but I actually like that HN is just raw text. Something minimal about it. You can always go full kaomoji if you feel sad ; (◞‸◟)

Rendello7• 10 months ago

I like emoji in personal texting, but I personally like that they're stripped from HN.

throw0101d7• 11 months ago

Are there any more heart emojis? I'm not sure we have enough with Beating Heart, Broken Heart, Two Hearts, Sparkling Heart, Growing Heart, Heart with arrow, Blue Heart, Green Heart, Yellow Heart, Purple Heart, Heart with Ribbon, Revolving Hearts, Heart Decoration.

* https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+1F300

The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.

What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?

Someone2• 11 months ago

https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html has a list of factors for inclusion (example: “is legible and visibly distinctive”) and a list of factors for exclusion (example: “is overly specific”)

I don’t think Unicode.org has a nice list of rejected proposals, but examples are easily googled, for example https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-propos...

jenniferx2• 11 months ago

Unicode's list of emoji proposal status: https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html

yorwba• 11 months ago

The process is described here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#process

The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.

Palomides2• 11 months ago

kinda mad guillotine got rejected, it concisely expresses a very popular sentiment

bigstrat2003• 11 months ago

They should all have been declined. Emojis are not text and have no place in a text encoding standard.

anigbrowl2• 11 months ago

Ugh, I really don't care for their selection process. Emoji should be open source even though that means there will be nazi emoji and porn emoji, it should be up to the user which ones they use. The selection committee seems like a very arbitrary group and many of their decisions seem equally arbitrary.

floxy• 11 months ago

Are there any more heart emojis?

I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394

...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters

amelius4• 11 months ago

:big-hypocritical-grin: please

amelius4• 11 months ago

What happened to the smiley-holding-heart emoticon?

It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...

Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.

madamelic2• 11 months ago

I love using emojis but can't stand what it has turned into.

I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.

At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.

We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.

I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.

Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.

dingnuts• 11 months ago

Every year, if an emoji is not used enough, it's deleted.

This would be like deleting kanji, and would also require perfect surveillance of everyone's devices.

If you want Chat Control you don't have to hide behind weird recommendations about emoji

madamelic2• 11 months ago

The proposal was tongue-in-cheek but the sentiment remains. There are way too many emojis and we should figure out a way to cull the herd.

mmastrac2• 11 months ago

You could easily do a zero-knowledge proof thing where you transmit a bitmask of emoji used over the next 365 days, with N bits randomly permuted. In aggregate, you'd still be able to count usage without saying definitively someone used or didn't use a particular emoji.

miloignis• 11 months ago

This feels more like a proposal for whatever emoji-picker you're using than for Unicode - I don't use most of the scripts defined by Unicode, and I don't use most of the emoji either. No one is forcing me to use every Unicode codepoint.

Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.

shafoshaf• 11 months ago

I basically still only use :), :(, and :P. I also have to "undo" it when they switch my chars to an actual emoji. The only one I wish were easier to show is ¯\\(ツ)/¯

zahrc2• 11 months ago

shrugs and walks off

ctippett• 11 months ago

Apple's text replacement feature is perfect for this. I have a bunch of ascii emojis that auto-complete for me when I type a matching string (I've based mine on the old BB Code emoticon syntax[1]), e.g. :shrug: → ¯\\(ツ)/¯ (as it happens I also have a text replacement that converts -> into an arrow).

[1] https://tl.net/forum/smilies.php

eviks7• 11 months ago

2000 vs 4000 makes no difference for the UI of a picker, and you can have your recently used/favorites with your 200 in the picker to avoid the long scroll

mmastrac2• 11 months ago

I'm excited to see the Seahorse emoji.

BeFlatXIII5• 11 months ago

Dragonfly, too. Or ZWJ sequences to create each of the My Little Ponies.

inanutshellus4• 11 months ago

Really wish skintone+gender emoji variants weren't an option in Slack.

It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.

It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...

When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)

pyrolistical• 11 months ago

Hmm. They should add indeterminate gender for all gendered emojis

uneekname• 11 months ago

That's already a thing!

https://emojipedia.org/neutral

cenamus• 11 months ago

The base yellow one?

LorenDB• 11 months ago

How about when a group chat has five different skin toned thumbs up reactions? So much for reaction based polls.

ascorbic2• 11 months ago

Slack groups the different variants, with counts for the total.

ascorbic2• 11 months ago

There are generic versions of all of them. All emojis have a base version without skin tone or gender applied. These are mostly displayed with yellow skin and a vaguely gender-neutral appearance. They're combined with modifiers to create the skin tone or gendered versions.

jameshart8• 11 months ago

I sympathize. But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow; while all the other Star Wars characters they had already made yellow without a second thought rather gave the game away that maybe yellow minifigs are actually white people. And it’s not a fluke: The Simpsons are exactly the same.

The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

aendruk2• 11 months ago

Is it specified that semantically neutral appear yellow or is the color free to vary by implementation/user preference?

adamrezich7• 11 months ago

The “LEGO (race) problem” was only a problem once LEGO began licensing IP (it was NBA first, not Star Wars, actually) and had to make minifigs to match real people. Before that, minifigs were perfectly raceless, able to abstractly represent whatever sort of characters that children could imagine—just like the yellow emojis.

Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”.

Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.

Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.

Findecanor• 11 months ago

LEGO is different from The Simpsons in that LEGO bricks for a long time were limited to seven colours: the four primary colours, white, black and light grey.

The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.

lmm2• 11 months ago

Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow

Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.

saurik• 11 months ago

We should go with purple. Nobody is even close to being purple. Hell: depending on your semantics, purple isn't even a real color. (Blue, of course, might should be reserved for AIs ;P.)

f33d5173• 11 months ago

Yellow doesn't represent anything, it represents nothing. It's a blank hole that people can fill in with their biases. White people will picture it to be white, black people can imagine it being black. That becomes a problem when you want to represent a black character, to a bunch of white people, who consider him being black an important part of his character. In other words it's (very deliberately) a bad tool for talking about race.

account4219• 11 months ago

The trap is thinking that because some creative works have made the mistake of assigning realistic skin tones to some characters based on race that we now need to repeat the same instead of learning from it.

sssilver• 11 months ago

The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis.

As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.

noAnswer• 11 months ago

The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

I thought the skin color thing is silly until I saw this vine. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g

Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.

wodenokoto2• 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure the yellow colour for emoji was chosen by NTT in Japan

throw0101d7• 11 months ago

But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow […]

If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?

giaour• 11 months ago

I get it, but I still wish I could use a non-realistic skin tone to match my mood instead of my body.

Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.

zahlman13• 11 months ago

the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure

Your analysis is ahistorical.

A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either.

More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media.

That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji.

The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it:

* They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter

* They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy".

My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is.

And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)

adamrezich7• 11 months ago

Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.

It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:

- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases

- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)

- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers

Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?

paulryanrogers8• 11 months ago

What did we gain from this?

The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.

And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion. The latter group has suffered centuries of oppression and exclusion, often based solely on their appearance, so it's an issue that impacts them differently.

Even "The Simpsons" has introduced characters with darker complexions alongside their yellow toned cast.

bombcar2• 11 months ago

Wrong.

They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.

And they should also support the gender combining code with any other emoji, in fact, any two emojis should be combinable (if you have the combination in your font, otherwise you just display both next to each other).

I'm only like 33% joking.

hdjrudni6• 11 months ago

any two emojis should be combinable

That's literally what emoji kitchen is.

They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.

Why stop there... we have 10-bit color and beyond now. Give me display-p3 (https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...)

deepsun• 11 months ago

Why cannot we at least make that UI-configurable? Everyone would select what gender and skin tone they want to see in their UI. Same as code colors -- there's one code, but everyone is free to configure their text editors to colorize whatever they want.

paulryanrogers8• 11 months ago

Is it so bad to just click to increment the emoji regardless of the color/tone choice made by the first reaction?

I suppose if Slack were open to 3P clients you could override all the tone variants to use your choice. Maybe you can make a browser extension?

petesergeant• 11 months ago

iirc Slack will remember your chosen skin tone and will increment it based on that, rather than the first colour chosen

deathanatos2• 11 months ago

Is it so bad to just click to increment the emoji regardless of the color/tone choice made by the first reaction?

This is sort of what I feel like the parent was implying without outright saying it, too. But: that's not how Slack works. If the only reaction is an emoji of skin tone A (let's say its a dark skin toned thumbs up), and I click that dark skin toned thumbs up to also react, Slack adds a thumbs up with the skin tone configured in the user's settings (which I believe defaults to no skin tone), not the skin tone of the initial reaction.

Settings → Messages & media → Default Skin Tone

WalterBright5• 11 months ago

I went through an emoji stage. Then realized I was wasting time looking for the perfect emoji and settling on an imperfect one. Then realized once again that a phonetic alphabet replaces all that nonsense.

WalterBright5• 11 months ago

i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up

May I suggest "sounds good"?

I'm glad the D forums don't allow emojis.

hdjrudni6• 11 months ago

No. That creates a new message which might have been 10 messages ago. If you want to react to an older message without flooding the chatroom, emoji is the only way to do it.

upcoming-sesame• 11 months ago

I've been using black thumbs up until now without realizing it's a racial thing... and I'm white.

are you telling me I've been offending people?

therealfiona• 11 months ago

Depends where you work. Personally, I will think it is odd, then move on. But your HR department may have a different view.

If it is a personal slack, then have fun!

I'm a big fan of the rainbow thumbs up because I like rainbows.

denkmoon• 11 months ago

Just use yellow then? You don’t have to broadcast your skin ton, and for those that it matters to they can.

hdjrudni6• 11 months ago

I don't know how it is in Slack, but in other apps if someone already thumb'd something up you have the option of just clicking their thumb to +1 it or you can go into the emoji picker and pick your favorite shade of thumb. Sometimes you do just want to +1 so you just click whatever is already there and that's when this awkward dance begins.

sedatk6• 11 months ago

It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up

You're also continuously broadcasting your skintone and gender in the office simply by existing. Is that inappropriate and unprofessional too?

philwelch11• 11 months ago

You can’t help the way you look but you can choose whether or not to go out of your way to deliberately draw attention to it.

account4219• 11 months ago

You don't make a statement that your skin tone is relevant simply by existing.

suddenlybananas• 11 months ago

I don't have to type my race when I write an email.

jszymborski2• 11 months ago

I don't understand this kind of thinking at all.

We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.

Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?

If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.

Very strange comment.

account4219• 11 months ago

Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people.

No, it's incredibly racist and sexist to think those things are the most important distinctions of who you are.

John238322• 11 months ago

Or people can be themselves and their skin tone?

Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?

hdjrudni6• 11 months ago

If someone uses my face as their avatar, yes.

If I use black skin tones as my default emoji set even though I'm white... I imagine others will find that weird at least.

Freak_NL9• 11 months ago

I'm pretty much against avatars featuring people's actual faces too. Digital communication pretty much allows us to completely disregard another's appearance, so why reintroduce that via the backdoor?

Emoji segregation feels off and backwards.

stronglikedan• 11 months ago

I just use the wrong emojis for my gender and skin tone. If anyone is truly offended by something as petty and insignificant as an emoji, it's like a scarlet letter warning me to not associate with them.

mock-possum• 11 months ago

Yeah same I think it’s fun to just pick randomly between colour and gender every time

chrismorgan• 11 months ago

Another aspect is contrast. We put such a lot of effort into getting adequate contrast between background and foreground, and then emoji skin tones destroy it.

On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.

Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.

Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.

adastra223• 11 months ago

How old are you? You don't have to answer of course, but I suspect this is either an age or a generational thing.

Being over 40, I just don't give a crap about those things.

deathanatos2• 11 months ago

Certainly the younger generations are not hung up on the skin tone of an emoji.

Some people customize them to more closely represent themselves. Some people use the defaults. Who … cares? … it's just an emoji.

Heck, for a while some emoji were only available in specific genders. (Those are much rarer, now.) Nobody where I work ever got hung up on the gender of an emoji not matching the user.

account4219• 11 months ago

Skin tones for emojis shouldn't be a thing at all.

There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.

And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.

nickdothutton• 11 months ago

I see emojis as purely semiotic. I don't expect to find personalisation or see myself reflected in them at all. Perhaps this is because of my age and use of emoticons in the BBS days of the late 1980s. Perhaps it's also because when i press for one on a screen, I still conceptualise that action as pressing a mechanical/physical button, where no customisation would be possible.

freehorse2• 11 months ago

This is why I hate this kind of stuff. Another reason that text-based emoticons like in the old times were far better. Why does anybody need to render ":(" into "U+1F641"? Nobody would ever think of debating race because of ":(". Unicode is not just technically confusing but spread sociopolitical confusion as well, like a contemporary babel tower. We could survive just fine in ASCII times, and on fewer bytes too, even if we had to be creative in how to represent languages with different alphabets.

chmod775• 11 months ago

Really? I just pick colors at random. The skin color of an emoji is so utterly irrelevant, I don't see how one can break into a sweat over it... or why it is an option in the first place really.

If it's there, you might as well have some fun with it.

OutOfHere2• 11 months ago

It is sad to see the limited Unicode character space go to waste with these silly additions. The unallocated space should be reserved for future civilizations, AI intercommunication languages that are yet to come, extraterrestrial languages that will emerge, etc. Filling up the space with garbage dooms it.

layer8• 11 months ago

At the rate at which new emojis are being added, the currently unallocated space would be exhausted in around 4000 years. However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.

account4219• 11 months ago

However, there's also the option to extend Unicode beyond U+10FFFF, if future civilizations are determined enough.

Can we do that now please to finally kill UTF-16.

OutOfHere2• 11 months ago

The way we think about time is very human-centric, and specifically it relates to individuals, not even to the lengths of civilizations. Even a human civilization is expected to last at least a thousand years. As for 4000 years or even 100,000 years, that would be nothing much to an AI. It would purportedly take several hundreds of thousands of years before sufficient memory corruption sank in to the point where algorithmically repairing the corruption, even if in a low steady dose, would be akin to neutering the individual identity of the AI.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 11 months ago

Why no soldier profession emoji?

Spivak2• 11 months ago

What country's uniform would they wear?

dotancohen• 11 months ago

Generic camo.

The soldiers in my country don't wear camo uniforms, and even to us it would be clear.

eviks7• 11 months ago

Which brand of a gun should be used?

petepete• 11 months ago

There are British soldiers.

https://emojipedia.org/guard

meta-meta• 11 months ago

The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.

JohnFen• 11 months ago

Yes, this is a really large problem that limits their usefulness as a means of communication. I limit myself to the most basic set (and use them sparingly) to avoid misunderstanding.

causal• 11 months ago

Yeah I always hesitate to use emojis in any document or design for this reason, you have no idea how it's going to look to other viewers

djhn• 11 months ago

Case in point: not all vendors implement flags!

Freak_NL9• 11 months ago

Or leave out a handful of flags and render the rest. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166519

aendruk2• 11 months ago

It would help if UIs made it easy to see the name of each emoji. Sometimes I even know what semantics I want but can’t discern which image it’s been assigned to.

Someone2• 11 months ago

On MacOS and iOS/iPadOS, you can search for them by name.

Doesn’t help with “what are they trying to say?”, but does help with your “how do I say FOO?”

batiudrami• 11 months ago

This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.

jameslk• 11 months ago

I really miss that old Samsung grimace emoji: https://imgur.com/02C8x4i

Or the eye roll one: https://imgur.com/FE664R2

Good times

seany• 11 months ago

I just want the gun to be a real gun again

0xdada• 11 months ago

A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.

bsimpson2• 11 months ago

Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.

There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.

https://www.orcas.pt/

anikom15• 11 months ago

I would be more receptive to endless emojis if Unicode bothered to accept archaic and historical forms of characters as well as deprecating Han unification. It’s rather odd that they reject actual useful things while accepting endless objects that have never been found in any text prior.

rmunn2• 11 months ago

I know several linguists who also know more than a little about computers. The number of times I've heard rants about the Unicode committee rejecting a perfectly valid historical character, yet adding more "modern hieroglyphics" (emojis)... well, let's just say that it's happened more than once.

lifthrasiir7• 11 months ago

Eh, Han unification was an one-off decision. Now many (but not all) characters have been disunified as needed, like the infamous Biang character [1] which received two different code points. Of course common characters are much less likely to be disunified, because at this point many decades have been passed after the initial encoding and any disunification would cause compatibility issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode

numpad08• 11 months ago

It's an upheld decision. The unification is not about reducing character counts overall, but to co-mingle CJKV languages. Adding more characters is not un-mingling existing characters.

One thing I feared might happen and do seem to be happening is, Chinese LLMs and AI projects seem to be moving towards Chinese-English bilingual models away from regular omni-lingual models, which, I think is, because LLMs would become confused with Chinese-invalid syntaxes and dictionary definitions, and/or generally perform worse, if substantial non-Chinese CJKV data was included in the dataset.

At the polar opposite of computing, Hollow Knight: Sliksong released just days prior is having Han Unification font problem as well: as you might know, thanks to Han Unification, CJKV languages each require its own font, of which no two cannot be active at the same time, and characters become mangled if application developer spends substantial cost implementing such non-standard feature. The developers was not aware of that, and did not spend extra cost doing so, and is getting review bombed in China.

It just needs to be reversed. It's a real problem. Adding more obscure characters and obscure features is tangential and not a solution. Different isolated clusters of characters uses need to be separated, not overlapped into one same area, like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary".

BeFlatXIII5• 11 months ago

Also, they ought to accept the Tengwar script.

zahlman13• 11 months ago

I still don't understand what's wrong with Han unification now that we have variation selectors, as well as... those characters that describe ways of laying out CJK character components relative to each other (I know I've seen these, but I have absolutely no idea what they're called and can't for the life of me figure out how to search for them).

(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)

throw0101d7• 11 months ago

For Unicode 17 more generally:

* https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45187274

There are some charts with the new characters available at:

* https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/

"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.

lifthrasiir7• 11 months ago

It is so amazing that the CJK Unified Ideographs block is still being extended to this day, even though I do know many intricacies of encoding those characters, like Z-variants and normalization rules and such. How many of these characters are left for encoding? I genuinely have no idea!

Freak_NL9• 11 months ago

It's probably academia catching up with historical documents digitised to Unicode. For CJKV any character can get added if it is found on an old scroll or something.

vegadw• 11 months ago

I just want sitelen pona in Unicode already >:(

int_19h2• 11 months ago

https://sites.google.com/view/sitelenemoji

bogdart• 11 months ago

They need to stop. The list is becoming ridiculously long.

km3r• 11 months ago

Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).

Rendello7• 11 months ago

Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.

For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).

elric• 11 months ago

It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).

We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.

AndriyKunitsyn• 11 months ago

Still no fig hand gesture emoji? Come on.

https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html

WalterBright5• 11 months ago

thousands of new characters, new scripts, new symbols, and of course… new emoji.

Just pointless madness.

AlexeyBelov5• 10 months ago

Can you elaborate?

WalterBright5• 10 months ago

Picture languages have all evolved into phonetic alphabets, because picture languages simply do not work. For example, you cannot look up a picture in a dictionary. You cannot look for it in an index. You cannot type it in, you have to search for it by scrolling through pages of them. You cannot tell if an icon for a duck is meant to represent a duck or a bird.

And where does one stop in adding pictures?

gnulinux2• 11 months ago

I honestly don't understand why Unicode still doesn't have all subscript and superscript letters, which I personally need to use almost every day--and I imagine many people who write math/code as well--but has 8 different varieties of alien emoji to choose from. I still can't write something as trivially simple as $1_G$ which would mean the "1" of group "G" (which is like being unable to write the word "the" if math was a language) because unicode lacks subscript G (capital) but I can send my wife a slideshow made solely of emoji. It's unfortunate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...

arp242• 11 months ago

The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.

While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?

nabla92• 11 months ago

Emojis are also formatting issue. Smileys: :) ;) :o

I don't understand why we need to add small images into character set. Hieroglyphs for those who can't read?

gnulinux2• 11 months ago

I don't want to debate, I just want to note that as a person who writes $1_G$ everyday, and also maintain Unicode char'd codebases (Agda) where have subscript G would be life saving: We understand that Unicode people think ^x _x is a formatting issue. It simply isn't any more than quotes, parenthesis, brackets are formatting. Subscript and superscript are their own thing regardless of formatting and they carry meaning and semantics. The simplest proof is $^{-1}$ which means "inverse" and has nothing to do with minus or 1 symbol, it's not a formatting thereof, it simply means "inverse", the same way recycle emoji mean "recycle".

eviks7• 11 months ago

But the currently encoded sub/supersripts counter that general view?

agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want

So? Should we stop adding emojis just because the potential is infinite?

And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic?

Add a combining prefix/suffix and you wouldn't need to do encode every single char from those alphabets. But also the general answer exists: whatever is commonly useful.

eviks7• 11 months ago

Indeed. Wouldn't the more universal solution to simply add a special unicode "prefix/suffix" combining code that would signal that the next symbol is sub/super? Than you wouldn't have to wait years for your favorite char to have an extra variatn while cursing at all the emoji proliferation?

keybored2• 11 months ago

Unicode with an emphasis on emoji is HN ragebait. Out of all the things, people get really upset that U+1F9B0 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR is taking up codepoint space.

runxel• 11 months ago

Very interesting. I did the treasure chest emoji proposal back in 2018.

Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.

Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!

cedilla2• 11 months ago

If you had asked me yesterday, I would have bet money on a treasure chest already being an official emoji.

Rendello7• 11 months ago

There was a big "Mandela effect" meme where people were certain there'd been a robber emoji:

https://emojipedia.org/robber-emoji-mandela-effect

chamomeal• 11 months ago

So when Unicode releases a bunch of emojis, is it kinda like releasing a spec? Like Apple/android then has to have their designers go and actually draw all of the emojis from the spec?

cedilla2• 11 months ago

In principle yes, but of course they don't have to. It's their own choice to have bespoke drawings. They also could just refuse to add the new emoji and just show �.

int_19h2• 11 months ago

Additionally, quite a few popular apps package their own emoji, at least in part. IIRC Firefox does this on Windows.

Rendello7• 10 months ago

It's also worth noting that the consortium is made up of members from big tech companies, among others:

https://unicode.org/consortium/directors.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium

npteljes5• 11 months ago

Yes. They don't even release a baseline font themselves, it's all up to the people who create fonts to create the drawings. This is dissimilar to how for example the Alliance for Open Media works, where they create the spec, like AV1, and also release a reference version of the codec.

stanac• 11 months ago

Coming spring 2026. I feel lucky, I don't have wait a full year for new emojis like Australians.

elitistphoenix• 11 months ago

Agreed. Companies need to learn there are two hemispheres.

defrost• 11 months ago

Well, twice as many 'hemispheres' are there are great ellipses (itself a word with two meanings).

Which is a pointless nitpick given those two cardinalities are the same.

runarberg• 11 months ago

So we have a treasure chest but still no lighthouse.

mns• 11 months ago

Or a submarine :(

hungmung• 11 months ago

Still bitter we never got the chainsaw emoji a few years back.

aydyn4• 11 months ago

Unicode has gone too far.

A handful of emojis, fine. Pictures are not language.

We don't need a bunch of new pictures to "support the world's writing systems" (their own words).

kanbara• 11 months ago

in fact, many proto languages were glyph based. human language and pictographs are intertwined— just look at how people use smileys, emoji, kaomoji, and more.

aydyn4• 11 months ago

Then include those languages. Emojis are not part of any language.

Dylan168072• 11 months ago

So is there any way to update your installed emoji on windows? I'm stuck on 12.0

stubish2• 11 months ago

This is all so archaic. Why are we sticking to a hard coded list? Instead, we just need emoji_start and emoji_end codepoints. The text between is rendered by AI into an emoji.

:homer_simpson_unsure_if_joking_or_not_meme:

rkomorn3• 11 months ago

Genius indistinguishable from madness.

hdjrudni6• 11 months ago

https://imgur.com/a/qA5aYso

I kind of love this idea...

LeoPanthera• 11 months ago

This is pretty much how Apple's genmojis work, but because they're platform specific, they get sent as png images.

stubish2• 11 months ago

I kind of like the randomness of platform specific. Never know if you are going to be squirting someone with a water pistol or blowing their brains out.

leokennis• 11 months ago

I shudder to be on the receiving end of these, using a phone with Apple "Intelligence" as its AI backend.

account4219• 11 months ago

We don't even need the AI, the text could just get rendered in the mind of the receiving person.

People who are imaginatively challenged can use assistive technologies so they are not left behind of course.

zahlman13• 11 months ago

I see what you did there :mrgreen:

llm_nerd• 11 months ago

While I understand that people like a base vocabulary of the common elements defined in a list, it has always seemed like a mistake that we keep adding to some massive list for every fringe demand, instead of just embedding tiny SVGs that can be perfectly aligned to every single platform, niche, industry, and so on.

amelius4• 11 months ago

Yes, I can remember during Covid that people used golf club emojis for a cotton swab. That's what I call emojical poverty.

amelius4• 11 months ago

Yes! (minus the AI part)

I feel like my (sub)language is being designed by committee. Ridiculous!

Show me a chat client/platform that can do inline SVG emojis and allow people to spread them using copy+paste and build emoji libraries, and I'll switch instantly.

kzrdude• 11 months ago

Nice. Instead of "this meeting could have been an email" now we have "this meeting could have been an emoji."

sandworm101• 11 months ago

Please stop. We have too many already. I cannot keep up with all the double and tripple meanings. I do not dare use an emofji for fear of unintended meaning. Just leave it alone for a few years.

brodo• 11 months ago

I‘m still a little mad about the fact that there are three alcoholic drink emoji but none for anything hemp-related. There where proposals for including them, but they where rejected. Another case of American puritanism determining online culture.

_ZeD_• 11 months ago

what unicode miss is mimosa's branches and italian cards (I really want to send a three of clubs or a seven of coins to some of my friends)

globular-toast• 11 months ago

Oh great, more stickers for children.

I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.

unglaublich• 11 months ago

I feel bad for the poor unicode implementers these days, what a metric ton of work. How would folks go about partial implementations? Or using fallback fonts for missing points?

masklinn• 11 months ago

Unicode implementation was always a ton of work. Far as I can tell there have been few novel features beyond ZWJ sequences maybe? I don’t know if these are treated separately or as ligatures by engines.

The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.

I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.

Rendello7• 10 months ago

I've been researching text encoding a lot lately, and man is it complex. But so much less complex than text rendering!

mixmix• 11 months ago

Never thought I'd say it but I really miss UCS-2.

jack21099• 11 months ago

Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard.

gertrunde• 11 months ago

Probably the one thing I find most frustrating about these current unicode emojis is that they have been extended/evolved so far now that they fail to fulfil their original purpose.

Original purpose: simple/clear way to convey an emotional context to text

Current result: "What the heck is does face even mean?" or "Let's use these symbols as the basic for unintelligible slang."

(Bonus extra issue: Different implementations with subtly different images that imply a slightly different emotional context)

More often than not, I tend to default to basic old text emoticons, as it more clearly expresses the intent.

Alifatisk• 11 months ago

Still hoping for flag of Kurdistan to be included

Rendello7• 10 months ago

As of 2022 the Unicode Consortium will not accept proposals for any new flags. Moving forward, anything with an ISO 3166-1 code will automatically get a flag. The Iraq Kurdistan subdivision mentioned below has a 3166-2 subcode, so doesn't automatically get a flag pushed though. They could've worded it less confusingly, but the rest of the article is quite thorough.

As a recent example, Kurdistan (a subdivision of Iraq) became an official subdivision in ISO 3166-2 (IQ-KR) on May 3, 2021. The corresponding Unicode subdivision code (iqkr) is slated for release in CLDR v41 on Apr 6, 2022. At that point the flag for Kurdistan will officially be valid — any platform, app, or font could support it. But that doesn’t mean it automatically gets in the queue for everyone’s phone. Only countries with ISO 3166-1 region codes are automatically recommended and require no proposal to move forward.

https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...

karel-3d2• 11 months ago

In 2017, I adopted a black woman in a steamy room emoji. (at https://aac.unicode.org/sponsors )

I am saddened that in 2025 she still fails to render in a lot of contexts.

(ZWJ sequence combining Person in Steamy Room, Dark Skin Tone, Zero Width Joiner and Female Sign.)

wodenokoto2• 11 months ago

Can you link to somewhere that can render it? I cannot imagine what this emoji would be.

karel-3d2• 11 months ago

https://emojipedia.org/woman-in-steamy-room-dark-skin-tone

edit: and now I see Slack can finally render her correctly - :woman_in_steamy_room::skin-tone-6:

I take it all back then. Slack can do it correctly now

DonHopkins• 11 months ago

They need to release an Epstein Files emoji!

MangoToupe• 11 months ago

I had no idea emoji were such a sensitive topic. This truly is a forum full of grumpy old men. I'll file this away as some of the best engineer ragebait I've ever seen.

npteljes5• 11 months ago

It is, because if you think about it, it's a top-down approach to something intimately integrated into most everyone's lives - into engineers' lives for sure. As it's top-down, it will be applied to everyone (to an extent), and as the source of it is just a bunch of humans, it's beholden to politics and intricacy, and so, controversy as well.

lyu07282• 11 months ago

A million things are like that, people are profoundly stupid, it's only ever an issue if someone invests money to cut propaganda against it to make people hate it. "Unicode gives us a shared codepoint space for all languages in the world, a deeply anti American idea, it fundamentally contradicts the ethno nationalist ideal our country was founded upon!"

BeFlatXIII5• 11 months ago

Still missing the sea horse, the pegasus, and the dragon fly.

Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0

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