Tomorrow's Emoji Today: Unicode 17.0
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The release of Unicode 17.0 brings new emojis, sparking debate among HN users about the proliferation of emojis, their utility, and the priorities of the Unicode Consortium.
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Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
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.
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/
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.
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.
After all, Sasquatch live near many rock climbing destinations. https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp
Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:
* 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?
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...
The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire
Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.
But glancing at your karma - are you contributing to a platform (HN) which outlaws wrongspeak, when you should start truly living your values?
Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.
https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
But yes, limited audiences. Exactly that.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
On your private site with your private client you can stuff whatever symbols you want for any particular code point I guess (§ Vendor use).
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
It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...
Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.
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.
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
[1] https://tl.net/forum/smilies.php
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.
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.)
https://emojipedia.org/neutral
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.
> When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity
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.
When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?
When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda.
The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version.
And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
> The yellow emoji is not perceived as neutral by either Black or White readers. On average, both groups perceive it as more likely to index a White identity, and we find this effect to be stronger among White readers.
I think you're onto something.
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? Or, if the study(s) were post-variance introduction, people came to think the supposedly-neutral colour is 'actually' white.
Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality?
Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.
And really, when you're talking about perceived racial overtones of emojis, "in their perception" is what matters, isn't it? There's no objective, 2+2=4 truth that we can point to in this particular argument, as there is in some arguments, because it's all about what subtext different people are reading into things. The objective truth is that those pixels are a certain color; the perception of them is subjective, varying from person to person.
And while some people prefer to use emojis that reflect their skin tone (whether it's lighter or darker), others prefer to use the yellow emojis instead of the ones that would better reflect their skin tone. The fact that they chose that color when they had other options available suggests strongly that they are trying to communicate a "skin tone doesn't matter in the context of this communication" message.
You are arguing that the yellow color isn't inherently neutral, but I claim that you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Even if the yellow color isn't inherently as neutral as it was intended to be, the fact that people are choosing it over colors that would more accurately reflect their skin tone means that it is neutral enough for the purpose.
When you put this much effort into saying "actually these things that don't literally resemble a white person's skin tone totally are intended to represent a white person's skin tone, because it's kinda vaguely similar; and for a long period of time you had people using the yellow to pretend to be inclusive but they really were just thinking of white people when they did it", it's hard to read that as anything other than "... and that's bad, and reflects a morally bad unconscious bias in favour of white people".
> The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are.
1. Why?
2. Why does the use of a smiley face to convey an emotion (no matter what colour it's drawn) have anything whatsoever to do with "identifying with" the face? What does it even mean to "identify with" a drawing?
https://www.docomo.ne.jp/info/news_release/page/20060711.htm...
Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later.
The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando.
They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it.
As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’.
My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.
I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy.
I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives.
Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably.
That is a misreading of what I said.
The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case.
So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc.
Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy?
Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
You dont need to do that.
You are the one who started out the thread by suggesting that it's somehow weird that white people don't use white skin-tone emojis, while also arguing that "yellow-as-default" is somehow problematic and/or insincere.
Those are both plainly political. Identity politics, and racial politics, are politics. You are implying that people should change their real-world behaviour for reasons related to race.
BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.
And not because they intentionally made yellow into white, but because they unintentionally made it so.
It's exactly the same as being an american vs being an african-american. You don't call white americans european-americans. Society (or media) assigned a racial default.
I'm gonna be a little more forward with this last argument: This is the product of mixed societies that have not dealt with racial bias and/or the consequences of racism well.
The fact is that there already exists a racial default, I didn't make it, it simply exists due to the nuances of our society, its history and/or its media.
I didn't invent either term and I am not THE dictionary.
This is how these terms are interpreted by the world and also through simple logic. I am not the one who interprets these terms and their usage.
American society and culture is still severely segregated due to how crappily it dealt with the consequences of its racist history.
White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
We're not talking about pure logic of meaning, we're talking about social usage of terms.
Because in the current ((zeitgeist)) Europeans are not allowed to have a racial identity.
Or Italian American.
> White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
African American is an alternative to "black". It was not invented to make a lesser form of "American". Your simple logic is just wrong, as these things frequently are.
Man, I'm not saying its lesser. I'm talking about how its used.
I think you want to assign morality to my arguments when im being as neutral as possible.
In some widespread contexts "american" is racially defaulted to white. Full stop.
Like I said were not talking about the pure logical meaning of words were talking about how society uses them.
No, this is a personal problem on your part.
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
It is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
Can you say what these widespread contexts are? Question mark.
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
This context is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
You’re a couple decades out of date. “African American” isn’t that commonly used anymore; the much more commonly used term is “black”. Or if you want to make a finer distinction, I’ve also seen the term ADOS (American Descendant of Slaves).
“Native American” is a neologism white liberals made up in the 1970’s because they didn’t like the term “American Indian”. It turns out almost all of the American Indians at the time preferred “American Indian” to “Native American”, but nobody actually asked them.
“European American” isn’t commonly used because at the same time that “African American” was popular, so was the idea that white people shouldn’t have a racial self identity at all so there was zero impetus to try and push a politically correct euphemism for “white”. Even today a common style decision is to always capitalize the term “black” but not the term “white”.
Furthermore, whenever we do talk about people in terms of nationality, such as during the Olympic Games, black Americans are consistently referred to as “Americans” rather than “African Americans”.
Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans. It’s just like whenever people talk about Japanese-American internment during WW2, they add “American” to underscore the injustice of treating US citizens that way. A Japanese national who wasn’t a US citizen could more justifiably be detained, just as Germans and Italians were, but treating Americans that way is beyond the pale.
What you’re doing here is taking a phrasing that was intentionally designed to use American patriotism to improve public perception of black people and twisting it around into yet another insidious form of crypto-anti-black racism using insane troll logic. And in that respect, you are the one missing the point.
I was explaining reasonings for lego defaulting yellow into white.
The defaulting of "american" into white does happen frequently in news headlines by simple fact of often referring to black people as "african americans" and white people simply as "americans".
And like someone else pointed out in the thread there have also been studies who have researched this topic. I think it's a real bias people/media seems to have.
You may have a point with your retelling of the history of terms, I dont really know and I wont pretend to know. Though i sense some racial resentment in you with your statement that white people shouldn't, or weren't allowed to, have a racial self identity. But that is beside the point.
> Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans.
I don't think it was to subjugate them I think those are after effects of this country who systemically subdued other races and identified itself as white. In part that will never go away because the majority is still white. But there is a latent bias in there. And that's what I'm pointing out.
You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism" when I point out that we come from a racist society. Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only. And that was almost 100 years AFTER slavery was abolished. The country was incredibly racist till relatively recently.
I am simply pointing out how the bias of a white nation still lives on in some way today and can be seen in the racial defaulting of little plastic figurine colors.
No, I'm saying you're accusing the people who coined the term "African American", or perhaps the term itself, of crypto anti-black racism.
> Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only.
80 years ago was 1945. Let me quote from the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 5, 1936, reporting on the performance of Jesse Owens in the Olympics. If you have access to newspapers.com you can follow this link to a clipping I created: https://www.newspapers.com/article/richmond-times-dispatch-j...
> The weather turned blustery with the day's usual shower but Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler and another capacity crowd of 100,000 jammed the big concrete stadium most of the day with Owens as the main magnet.
> Der Fuehrer joined in terrific applause accorded the American ace whose performances now have thrilled upwards of 300,000 spectators three straight days and given the Olympic games their most outstanding individual performer since Paavo Nurmi's exploits of 1924 when the "Phantom Finn" won three gold medals.
> After fouling on his first trial in the finals, Owens jumped 26 feet 39-64 inch, finally 26 feet 5 21-64 inches while the stadium echoed with a roar that could be heard all over the Olympic plant.
89 years ago, an American newspaper--one in the south, no less--referred to Jesse Owens, without any further qualification, as "the American ace".
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the same date: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-plain-dealer-owens-cl...
> AMERICANS ROUT WORLD IN OLYMPICS > Owens Cracks Broad Jump Record as U.S. Wins Four Events. ... > The United States track and field forces put the athletes from the rest of the world to rout today in one of the greatest field days any nation ever experienced in Olympic competition. > Four times the Stars and Stripes waved triumphantly from the victory flagpole as Uncle Sam's stalwarts staged a smashing exhibition of sprinting, leaping, and hurdling before a crowd of 110,000. > Americans made a clean sweep of all championships in the men's division, retaining their broad jump supremacy with a record-breaking Olympic leap by John Cleveland (Jesse) Owens, 22-year-old Ohio State Negro...
The story does state Owens' race in a dated and uncomfortable way. (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?) But note that prior to doing so, the article twice includes Owens in statements about "Americans" routing the world and making a clean sweep of championships, and lauds him as one of "Uncle Sam's stalwarts". I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
> And so how does this relate to legos?
I would be justified in asking you the same question. Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
> (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?)
I don't think its awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someones race. I'm mixed and I identify as both black and white, purposefully.
I can tell how deep you are into the culture war because you seem to be arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure of me that you have in your head.
Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, ill tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm a sociology expert for internet points but there are many papers that show evidence of what I'm saying and they are not hard to find at all. Literally put a small amount of effort and you'll see at least 5 pop up. You can analyze their results if you want.
> Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Hilarious, dude. You totally lost the plot. I was using "american" vs "african american" bias as an analogy to explain the "yellow was universal" but that lego then decided to add brown lego figures. Yellow wasn't actually universal, yellow was white. White was then implicitly seen as universal.
The culture warrior has ended themselves.
There is nothing wrong with the majority becoming seen as a default. It is inevitable, because defaults are useful, and choosing anything else would increase the fraction of the time that it's wrong.
We were talking about "yellow" being racially neutral according to lego and how that was proven wrong by lego themselves.
Same thing happened in US media (by media i mean all mediatic content).
Its the cause of racialized realities. It absolutely is the result of racist societies.
And sure, the majority being a single race is a neutral fact today. But how we got there is absolutely through a racist history.
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.
Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
This feels more like virtue signaling than any kind of reason: This kind of logic lets you forever find new kinds of racism that you can then make performative fights against so that you can ignore real issues that plague the world.
Take these images, how recognisable would any of the characters (those with hair) be with different hair?
https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/35476104/296227...
https://75609.cdn.simplo7.net/static/75609/sku/funko-pop-fun...
It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong.
But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
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.
Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
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.
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.
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