Clever and fun read. Helps me think of emojis' literary affordances.

Here on a website that deprives us commenters of emoji, I feel expressively constrained.

Or maybe I'm too lazy to remember how to express myself with Japanese emoticons.

Will we get a trainman for the emoji era?

<3

Personally, I think adding emojis to UNICODE was a mistake.

One obvious missing modifier is the ability to animate them. There are a gazillion possibilities here, from the simple (slowly rotating or pulsing) to the complex (morphing one emoji into another). Some apps already do this when showing a reaction emoji for the first time by "popping" them into view, but I predict the next generation will allow the user to apply their own simple animations. The key will be to prevent them from being too annoying, like the dreaded <blink> tag of yore.

If anyone in the unicode consortium is reading this, we really, really need a chainsaw emoji.

One big problem with this interpretation: expressivity is severely limited with computer text compared with handwriting where you can do what you want, and Unicode is about encoding what already exists, not creating anything new. You could say things like emoji skin tones are an exception to that rule, but modifiers are very limited in Unicode due to how it’s all implemented, and can’t develop in the way described near the end.

This analysis and comparison to ancient glyphs completely overlooks how emojis are tied in to technology manufacturers and therefore their profit interests. Emojis have been a major driver of the planned obsolescence business model. iOS (and even Android before version 12) requires a full operating system update if you want to get the newer emojis; eventually, that means having to buy a new Apple device. The constant addition of new emojis (and their essential role in social media) is one of the many pressure points that Apple uses to get their existing users to buy new devices.

Still no diaper emoji. :(

So many useless symbols but no feed icon.

Pretty good writeup! Missing some very fun details, though, which is normally fine but... well, the final paragraph is just hard to stomach. If that's not Claude I'll eat my hat.

Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<

EDIT: I now realize that this "pretty good writeup" is by one of the people in charge of Emojis, and thus just made some aggressive editorial decisions. Leaving this comment up to remind others to check the Substack's author before commenting!

I mean, why can't you just add another 4000? Search in emoji list works well enough.

All emojis are childish nonsense. The article shows what it calls emojis but I would call symbols. I don't care if you think you're having fun. If you use them you are acting like a child.