
Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist - willstrafach
https://www.businessinsider.com/it-is-what-it-is-eyemoutheye-emoji-mystery-app-twitter-2020-6
======
whymauri
The statement is the most interesting part, in my opinion:

[https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement](https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement)

>In a strange way, this sort of became an anti-statement against what we’d all
seen on tech Twitter. We’re a diverse, ragtag group of young technologists
tired of the status quo tech industry, and thought that we could make the
industry think a bit more about its actions. Despite calls-to-action like that
“It’s Time to Build” essay we’ve all read, most of the industry (from product
teams to VC) still stays obsessed with exclusive social apps that regularly
ignore — or even silence — real needs faced by marginalized people all over
the world, and exclude these folks from the building process. As an industry,
we need to do better.

~~~
perl4ever
You've got to be part of a very insular and exclusive group to know what "tech
twitter" is. Let alone these "exclusive social apps" they allude to.

~~~
anoncareer0212
That's the really cringy part of this, the only people who are talking about
this being deep are the people who have been pumping that garbage into my
timeline for the last decade

~~~
dmix
This has San Francisco written all over it.

------
ALittleLight
"Most importantly, we raised over $60,000 in donations from people who hoped
to get special treatment within our fabled waitlist."

Isn't this basically fraud? "Hey, give us money and we'll help you get
something. Nope, just kidding, we gave your money to charity and that
'something' we promised doesn't exist."

~~~
aripickar
It was more of a case of "Donate money to these causes and see what happens".
Not fraud

~~~
amingilani
I'd say it's borderline fraud. They've been retweeting app screenshots with
that emoji combination on it[0], retweeting people saying someone took their
"username on that emoji app"[1], and directly tweeted "we’ll see what we can
do about an invite" if people donated and sent receipts. And now they're using
this publicity to gain employment and sell merchandise.

This team mislead people to "support causes" and is now profiting off their
newfound fame. I have nothing against non-profits getting more money,
but...I'm not sure if I'm happy about this situation here. The ends really
don't justify the means.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/itsmezhi/status/1276617354013626368?s=20](https://twitter.com/itsmezhi/status/1276617354013626368?s=20)

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12764265029435187...](https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/1276426502943518720?s=20)

[2]:
[https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12766503684207656...](https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/1276650368420765697?s=20)

~~~
tedunangst
Tangentially, if you donate money and receive something tangible, then deduct
the full amount from your taxes, that's tax fraud. Maybe giving donors nothing
in return is just their way to help prevent inadvertent tax trouble.

------
chrismorgan
Ugh, BI mangles the emoji badly: the breadcrumb turns each emoji into two of
U+FFFE REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which suggests something turns it into UTF-16
(that accursed encoding that ruined Unicode by making the always-doomed UCS-2
live longer even though the just about uniformly superior UTF-8 was already
available, and which persists in distressingly many languages), then tries to
turn it into UTF-8 by iterating through each _UTF-16 code unit_ rather than
each Unicode scalar value. Then the summary and body of the article just
vanish the emoji altogether!

———

I’m fascinated to observe that Firefox Nightly on Windows is, when using a
font stack that _doesn’t_ include Segoe UI Emoji (e.g. the headline of the
Business Insider article, and the body of [https://xn--
mp8hai.fm/statement](https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement), but not the header of
the statement), _not_ emojifying the _first_ U+1F441 EYE, but emojifying the
second. I can’t think of any way this could not be a bug. ( _Update:_ found a
report from about a year ago,
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178)
.)

Chrome is not emojifying either, which is reasonable when its font fallbacks
hit some other font that includes EYE first.

For best results on things like this, include U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16
after each code point to say “emojify it if you possibly can”. (See also
U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15, which says “render it in the old style without
colour, please”.) Then you don’t need to worry about whether the font stack
hard-codes system emoji fonts.

~~~
xvilka
One more reminder that UTF-16 should go away and everyone should use UTF-8
everywhere [1].

[1] [http://utf8everywhere.org/](http://utf8everywhere.org/)

------
BelleOfTheBall
Not a surprising outcome, considering that the general attitude in Tech
Twitter is wanting to learn everything, to get in on the ground floor of cool
stuff, etc. It's a harmless-ish prank since the money went to good causes and
most people willing to donate just to get in on some app clearly have
disposable income. Still misleading and not "victimless" but it's probably the
most fun many people have had in this hellish year.

------
an_opabinia
Another interpretation of the meme is that even for something pretty obscure,
virality alone is worth about $20k/day.

------
Barrin92
William Gibson was ahead of the curve with this in _Pattern Recognition_ and
the idea of anti-marketing, where secrecy itself becomes the distinguishing
factor in creating interest mostly of perpetually bored, shallow, bohemians
and the plot centers around finding the source of deliberately hidden
anonymous film clips.

~~~
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
Well spotted. Did you read that recently? How did you make that connection?

------
saagarjha
I'm pretty sure that emoji combination was in use for quite a while before
this happened. Actually, when I saw it around Twitter I assumed it was people
just referencing that or using it for its slightly surreality…

~~~
nickthegreek
I’ve seen kids using it on TikTok for at least 2 weeks

~~~
berberous
Their statement said this started out when a group of friends put the emojis
in their profile after seeing it on tiktok, and then people started to wonder
if they were all working on something together, so they ran with it.

------
xenospn
They could've made it much bigger and raise 10x as much. Not sure why they
stopped after 2 days.

------
synaesthesisx
Apparently they’ve already raised their pre-seed at a $1B valuation. Cheers to
the team!

------
rjeli
That article read like GPT2, not even GPT3. The same few points over and over
for a dozen paragraphs. Didn’t actually explain why or how anyone donated
money to this fake startup/charities

~~~
Nasrudith
They sound like "Social Text" style bullshit really. Tons of fashionable
ideological buzzwords and their own arcane cant for cant's sake, deliberate
unpleasability in terms of vast complaints, and having no remotely concrete
plans. They shame them for supposed inadequacy of donations and involvement
but what would the donations actually be used /towards/ and how would they
help the recipients? They already ignore the "boring" answers like
scholarships and outreach initatives as not radical enough.

To be frank the actors come across as either insane narcissists or acting in
cynical bad faith. They get to feel good about it and/or gain influence but
actually helping anybody? They are doing their adversary's work for them while
lauding themselves for it!

------
soared
The lyrics from the music video that first created the emoji combo is pretty
much this group’s thesis:

>Stop blaming twitter. Stop blaming black men. Just because you not getting
chose.

[https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s](https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s)

Twitter, blm, exclusivity building hype from people who aren’t getting chosen
to join. Honestly pretty eloquent.

------
runnr_az
For me - a guy who runs an emoji domain registration site - I've been sort of
waiting for the right project to take off, so it becomes, like, a thing. Will
this finally be our moment? (I wish I could put a shrug emoji in here...)

~~~
colejohnson66
Would ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ work?

------
mahaganapati
> as was shone with invite-only app,

Shouldn't that be "shown"? Or is it a pun?

~~~
carapace
I think it's just bad editing, it should be "shown".

------
jasonbourne1901
I guess we all just learned a trick to check for traction on an idea!

------
tmabraham
I was wondering why I was seeing this meme on my Twitter feed. When I first
looked it up I couldn't find anything about it... Now I know...

------
buboard
Software enters postmodernism

~~~
perl4ever
It's weird to me that "postmodernism" is eternally current. It was invented
like 90 years ago! It reminds me of how people have been talking about
millennials so long as youth that they're about to start turning 40.

~~~
labster
My own theory is that postmodernism is much much older. Even some of the
Mannerist art from the late Renaissance has that sort of conceptual dissonance
to me.[0]

The four big pillars are romanticism, which is focused on the past; realism is
concerned with the present, modernism is focused on the future. And then
postmodernism exists as some sort of combination of the three, combining
elements of each in surprising ways -- sometimes a synthesis, other times a
rejection.

Of course all my university education is in physical science so this is
probably stupid and wrong.

[0]: Seriously, look at this one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Librarian_(painting)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Librarian_\(painting\))

~~~
perl4ever
That's fine, but I feel disoriented by the idea that postmodernism was it,
that there's nothing after it. Is that all there is?

Then again, "The End of History" was almost 30 years ago!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_That_All_There_Is%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_That_All_There_Is%3F)

------
cagenut
In a world of rapidly increasing inequality FOMO actually is the rational
response. Most people _are_ missing out.

~~~
HenryBemis
I perceive FOMO to be a chance to waste time. I miss-out on a billion things
per day, I am not reading 10k new articles per day, not playing a million
games per day, not eating hundreds of cuisines per day, etc. so I can focus on
the 5 articles, and 5 songs, and 3 lunches that I choose to.

If you call that FOMO you are more desperate than you imagine (or probably
cannot even imagine) and you will always be chasing something that cannot be
caught.

Equality is not achieved by fighting FOMO, but by fighting inequality.
Solution (imho) is not to battle 24/7/365, but by picking battles you can win.
Yea a government can win far more battles should they want to, and your battle
it to be poking them to do so.. but FOMO is irrelevant to the story, just a
thing that adds to confusion and, eventually, inaction.

------
bJGVygG7MQVF8c
This was a very effective way to demonstrate the venality and homogeneity of
techie PMCs. Unfortunately, donating that money to BLM is itself a
manifestation of that venality and homogeneity.

If only we could devise a way to get money from the wealthy to fund projects
that benefit the non-wealthy instead of the billionaire-supported NGO class...

------
FailMore
If you want to try a thoughtful social network, you can checkout the one I'm
building, Taaalk.

[https://taaalk.co](https://taaalk.co)

It's a platform for long form text based conversations between closed groups
(that everyone can read).

