
Why the Emoji Was Inevitable (2017) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/why-you-need-emoji
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phoe-krk
Emoji are inevitable because text - the basic communication medium on the
Internet - is a very poor medium for conveying emotions. That's why first
emoticons, and then emoji - the modern pictograms - happened.

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c3534l
Writers have relied on their words only to convey emotions for a very long
time. It's only recently that we've been drawing faces next to our words
instead picking good ones.

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phoe-krk
Most people on the Internet aren't writers, and don't want to spend long
minutes of reading text to get an emotional reaction that they can get in an
eyeblink by looking at an emoticon. Literary expression of emotion isn't
something easily comparable to emoji.

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papito
Eh, I could just write [wink], or [SAD FACE].

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LocalH
Emoji are just the evolution of that idea. They're more pleasing to look at,
as well.

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papito
Yeah, but now we have to think about it. "Hey, do we have a test for when
someone types in an emoji into their credit card number?". Punks.

~~~
giggles_giggles
That's a funny example considering an input validation routine for credit
cards should automatically throw out any input consisting of more than
numerals and spaces. You don't need to test for Unicode or emoji when there
are only 11 possibly valid characters in the input.

~~~
LocalH
On a tangent, I find it interesting how many people who came up during such a
period of profound change as the computing revolution, still have problems
with other changes.

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goatinaboat
Back in the day emoticons/emojis/whatever were just bright yellow cartoons. No
race, no gender. It was fine. Combined with ASCII text it was pure
communication unfettered by any prejudice. Then like everything else on the
internet it all became weirdly political almost overnight :-/

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WilliamEdward
How exactly are differently coloured emojis political or prejudiced?

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goatinaboat
Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical
discussion? Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? It’s only
there because some people want to make it matter. I just use the default
yellow.

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dragonwriter
> Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical
> discussion?

Slack isn't just for technical discussions.

> Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even?

Almost certainly, yes, whether or not it should.

> It’s only there because some people want to make it matter.

More accurately, it's only there because it does, in fact, matter to some
people. But that's true of every way of expressing any difference of meaning
in any communication medium.

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blululu
In retrospect anything is inevitable. Without Apple trying to sell phones in
Japan on Softbank’s network on an OS built to play mp3s it seems unlikely that
people would have hacked the Unicode spec to draw smiley faces. That said rich
text is the future - hence html.

~~~
gumby
Emojis far predated the iphone, much less its introduction in Japan, hence the
global use of the Japanese term.

As for the Unicode issue: each phone network (and some of the pre-phone
Japanese computers) used different code points and had different sets of
emojis.

Also is iOS really "an OS designed to play mp3s?" it isn't the iPod's simple
OS and really was a version of OS X.

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coldtea
Now, instead or in addition to the BS dozens of emoji they put in
Unicode/system fonts every year for the last decade, can we get them to add
the powerline glyphs?

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big_chungus
In the mean time, this is a good alternative which I've used:
[https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts](https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-
fonts)

But no, they won't add them, because God forbid they actually do something
useful. It's obviously more important they add five different skin tones...
still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. Not everything has
to be politicized.

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jhbadger
I get that sometimes some sign of emotion needs to be expressed in text, but
there were ways of doing that before emojis existed. We had smileys like :-),
;-) and :-(. And tags like <sarcasm></sarcasm>.

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kylek
I think I've finally made peace with emojis. However, automatic conversion
from smilies to emojies still drives me nuts >:|

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zeta0134
This is the _main_ thing that drives me nuts. I'm fine with emoji, I'll even
use them on purpose from time to time, but please let me decide when and how.
There's nothing more infuriating than a computer replacing something I just
typed with something its developer thought was better.

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MrEldritch
I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only
was it annoying, it was _wrong_ \- :) was invariably replaced with something
that was _very definitely_ the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what
was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!

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cat199
inevitable, perhaps, but invented long before most people were on the internet
(or even born):

Here's AP from 12 years ago talking about the 25th anniversary of the
'smiley':

[https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-
tu...](https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-turns-25)

