> 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.

> 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)?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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...)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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

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.

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

That's already a thing!

https://emojipedia.org/neutral

The base yellow one?

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?”

I just want the gun to be a real gun again

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

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

Good times

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

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

It’s always been Craugh for me.

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

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

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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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

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

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".

Generic camo.

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

Which brand of a gun should be used?

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

shrugs and walks off

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:

> 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.

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.

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.

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).

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