It's US's current cultural trend, which is now enforced on the rest of the world, and also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities.
Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms.
> also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities
Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion.
Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.
The Unicode Consortium is a consortium, big enough to work on multiple issues at once. If you think the consortium should work on third world languages, then you should join the consortium and work on third world languages.
Why do these require much energy? Unicode is big, why not just add everything? I still am pissed of by the fact they rejected Tengwar - how much energy would it take to add (id nobody opposed)?
Although yellow seems like it's good for everyone (since no one is actually yellow), it ends up still representing the majority. Just look at the Simpsons - all the characters are yellow, but not Apu.
Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.
This is a great example. All the yellow characters in The Simpsons are coded white (from my recollection).
Nobody is actually yellow, but bright yellow skin is very clearly obviously not black or dark brown; it's much more functionally similar to light skin tones.
Maybe the "true" solution would be to use a color that's completely different from all skin tones, such as a very deep blue color. But my immediate reaction to the thought of deep blue emoji is that I wouldn't identify with them - which, again, kind of proves the point that bright yellow is much easier to identify with for light-skinned people
I'd wager that the popularity of dark emojis has more to do with their contrast and less with politics. Most dark people in the world aren't minorities where they live.
I haven't watched the Simpsons, but it's really unfortunate that they did that. I suppose the problem with fictional skin colors is people will always assume it represents the racial majority. Similar to how icons are usually coded male in the absence of female signifiers.
I wonder if it's possible to avoid that. What if at the outset, we'd used a different color for every emoji? Smile could be green, frown could be blue, wink could be yellow, etc.
What does that mean though? I see Fat Tony as Italian-American, Rainier Wolfcastle as Austrian, and Akira as Japanese. The majority of the population of Springfield, which is supposed to be somewhere in North America, is probably "white".
So the context of the show itself, and how characters are portrayed imply their race/nationality. This is not true of an emoji.
I wonder why I see the take "I don't use this thing/see the value, therefore it is bad and shouldn't exist." so much more on HN than anywhere else? It's such a weird view.
In my opinion it’s part of the famous hackernews shallow/middlebrow dismissal that PG described almost a decade ago. “This isn’t my use case, and is therefore worthless” is also very similar to the famous “This is silly, anybody could build this” top comment on the Dropbox launch post. It’s not limited to HN either - see the Reddit comments on any movie not targeted at the 20-30 male demographic, or hackaday comments on anything looking to improve usability.
I didn't read his statement like that at all. Sounds like just your biased take about opinions you don't like, and that you don't find opinions you don't like much outside HN.
Last fall, I found the plist files which control OS X's character picker, and spent an evening backporting seven years worth of new emojis to OS X 10.9 Mavericks[1]. The one thing I couldn't get working was skin tone variants, because Mavericks has no concept of them. All emojis in the picker are yellow.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got a really nasty email accusing me of being all sorts of racial things, because I hadn't included skin tones. I don't know if this person was just trolling or crazy or what, but they were really mad! I'd never received an email like this before, so I was pretty upset.
It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages.
After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard:
From what I’ve seen, the skin tone feature sees lots of use (particularly in some minority communities), which to me is a good indication that this is something that people wanted.
Not at all. Major apps and OSes put a "choose your race" message on their UI (and very strongly direct people to make that choice). This does not mean there was pre-existing latent demand for this.
What this shows is if you inject the concept of racial self-identity onto cartoon symbols, and afford people a way to navigate that selection, people can do that. Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial.
We can’t eternally keep the status quo just to avoid opening cans of worms. If we don’t intend to throw it away, we might as well open it and face the worms.
This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null.
But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
I think skin tone color band aids are different, people have different skin tones and the old default only blended well on people with light skin so the new ones are nice for people.
With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
> This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null. But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
And now we have superheroes band aids, Elsa band aids, transformers band aids, teddy bear band aids.
You'd be fired for this comment in any big american corp today. The big players in the US have been pushing a new version of the divide&conquer agenda to the poor so they wouldn't accidentally develop class conscience. Basically, most Americans are being divided along the gender and race lines: men vs women vs trans, and white vs black vs asian vs latino. The goal must be dividing the society into a few tens of alienated camps that don't talk to each other. This policy is being pushed hard at every level: from schools and offices, to DoD and WH. It's pretty much an awkward religion or rather a cult, with church, heresy, bishops and inquisition.
Because Unicode emoji started out with a bunch of crap they couldn’t ever say no to new proposals because someone will say “why do we need a man levitating emoji and not skin tone modifiers?” And while we are at it, we need a woman levitating and gender neutral person levitating.
If they simply stuck with supporting those for legacy reasons, then things would have been fine. But no line in the sand was drawn.
IMHO there should be a moratorium for (say) five years to let things settle, and see new ones are actually needed, or if it's just inertia driving recent additions.
The Simpsons is not the authority on the meaning of yellow skin for generically representing human body parts. It’s a tv show. The iconic happy face symbol is not intended to specifically be a white person. Pac man is not a white person.
Exactly, yellow was neutral and in line with emojis in general. Now do I have to decide on my skin tone? Will people get offended if I choose a darker tone?
And what would someone use a handshake emoji for exactly?
Agreed. The fallback emoji in particular is very confusing, doesn't look like a handshake, and is only necessary because of this particular solution to a problem that no one had.
I don't have an issue with this-- if people find value in it, fine. I don't think I will use this though. There are too many combinations that I am too likely to get wrong.
Why shouldn’t people have a way to express themselves that they want? Are there words or spellings that computers should refuse to display?
I am not a fan of how Unicode has treated emojis, but there is no question they are completely within scope in principle (they were part of extant keitai character sets) though the way they are being extended by the UCS makes me uncomfortable.
But so what? People like to use them which seems like enough justification.
unicode itself is a terrible can of worms. There are so many edge cases that adding black emojis is hardly a big deal. Black emojis is not complicated compared to some of the languages out there.
The appearance of skin tone emojis are bad enough but the thought that someone consciously took their time to choose the skin tone of the emoji that best matched their own in their mobile phone UI makes it that much more bad.
Emojis communicate. Race of the speaker can add important context to the thing being communicated. Adding skin tone to emojis allows them to communicate this.
With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation.
TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.
Yes, Americans invented the Cotton Gin and Racism around the same time, and no other culture ever has cared at all about representation or inclusion./s
I doubt this was solely Americans or that Americans are the only group of people that care about race/ethnicity. Maybe your findings are different. Please let me know where to find your publishings.
Because it "erases Blackness and centers whiteness as a default", that's the standard answer.
Yellow codes for the default, which is whiteness. Or said another way, white skin is the only unracialized skin color. Thus the supposedly neutral yellow stands for it.
Why couldn’t they do HANDSHAKE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE? I don’t understand why a new emoji is necessary — the author alluded to “making sense without an OS update” but without an OS update the new emojis won’t render at all, whereas this solution would at least kinda make sense (it would be a yellow handshake followed by two skin color blocks, I believe, just like on devices that don’t support skin tone modifiers for other emojis)
I thought so too first, but I think that would be a quite difficult solution. Skin tone is supposed to only come after some specific code points. We don't want all the grapheme splitting algorithms to break, and it would really change the meaning of zwj fundamentally.
I’m a bit confused; the article alludes to the fact that the handshake emoji doesn’t include skin tones at all, then solves for adding two different tones. Is there a reason we don’t just have [handshake]+[single skin tone]?
Ah, I didn't realize skin tone was specified to only appear after certain emojis -- that seems rather limiting to forwards compatibility to me, but I'm sure there's a good reason for it.
Good question. Maybe this handshake work paves the way to make other emoji more representative too! I bet you could reach out to the author and get involved with making that change.
Yeah, the family emoji are a mistake of sorts. Fortunately, individual emoji strung together convey the idea of a "mixed family" with three kids and require no effort on Unicode's part to add new emoji. Ex:
As an English speaker I don't gender my speech about myself.
But to use some emoji (e.g. facepalming) I must gender that speech, and therefore myself. I'd prefer not to have to do this, especially to relative strangers on the Internet, so I appreciate that "person-facepalming" is becoming available on more platforms.
It'd be nice if the gendered variants were collapsed a bit (like the skin color variants) to reduce clutter.
I don’t use emojis much but if you use Discord they have male, female and “person”! I always use person because I feel weird specifically selecting what gender I am. Feels like I’m making a “big” deal out of nothing I guess
If your goal is anonymity, it's worth nothing that you are revealing more bits of information about yourself by using the person-facepalming variant than one of the gendered ones.
What makes you think this is about anonymity? I would guess it's more about the author's identity and being represented in technological evolutions since we absolutely have the technology these days.
I’m sure the next step for the handshake emoji is people complaining about hands with five fingers being “ableist”, and subsequently a number-of-fingers modifier will be added.
It used to be that "plain text" was pretty much impossible to make malicious. Security conscious people have the option of only interpreting plain text emails, for example. This seems to be another example of the human imperative to increase the complexity of everything until it become problematic and then unusable.
I suppose in the future there will be people that refuse to interpret emojis...
Why? Why so much effort is put in something so meaningless as emojis? There's nothing more confusing than messages with emojis. When I read the text I know what information writer wanted to send me because it was all coded inside the text. When I see emoji I have to stop and think, what the writer wanted. Is it part of the information or just the background noise? Should I 'read' this emoji as a part of the sentence or as a separate phrase? Clear text is just so much less confusing.
I hate to say this but you might be old and out of touch
emoji's are part of text communication in the same way facial expressions and body language are part of oral communication. Yes, sometimes they'll be misinterpreted, but the same is true of text alone anyway (were they being sarcastic? Are they angry?)
> I hate to say this but you might be old and out of touch
I think you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. It is true, emojis can be an important part of communication but until the same graphics start being used on all platforms, devices and services, emojis are a quite bad medium for communication. My phone, my browser, whatsapp, slack, I think twitter too and so on use their own graphics™ which have subtle differences.
Why not? Why do you care about the effort other people put into things that they care about? To such an extent that you’ll put effort into criticising things which are of literally no relevance to you?
> Clear text is just so much less confusing.
Yeah nah.
Just because you’re not hip to it doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. I don’t understand most slangs, whether in my own mother tongue or in foreign langages I more or less understand.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to assert cockney rhyming slang or verlan is “meaningless”.
You've missed the point completely and have created a strawman-based rant.
The problem with emoji is that there is no dictionary, no standardised meaning or interpretation guidelines; no unified, context-dependent cues that everyone subconsciously agrees to. When you try to communicate non-verbal cues using them, it works well because there is a general understanding of what is meant though even there, cultural differences sometimes get in the way. Something like a smile cuts across cultures pretty universally.
When emoji start getting overused to the point where you have to draw meaning from the skin tones involved in a handshake, that's a step too far IMHO. This is precisely why we struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics and precisely why emoji must remain a supplement to language, not a replacement for it as many use.
Because the complexity these things introduce affect all of us. They make software harder to build and maintain, and they introduce bugs and security vulnerabilities.
We should strive for less people overall in software with a better sense for quality, than getting everybody to pile more junk on this dumbster fire that is computer science.
Developing and writing up emoji variants provides employment for people who specialize in particular branch of culture. It is a complement to buying advertising with the activist press - both ensure positive coverage on the social media and in the more formal publications.
This is untrue... Like all the stuff have not to be abused, but when used properly they're great also in technical communication (including code comments or git commits).
Another story is when you write with them and instead of a formatting tool become your words.
Readit News
Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms.
Related: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion.
Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.
https://www.unicode.org/consortium/joinform.html
Dead Comment
Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.
This is a great example. All the yellow characters in The Simpsons are coded white (from my recollection).
Nobody is actually yellow, but bright yellow skin is very clearly obviously not black or dark brown; it's much more functionally similar to light skin tones.
Maybe the "true" solution would be to use a color that's completely different from all skin tones, such as a very deep blue color. But my immediate reaction to the thought of deep blue emoji is that I wouldn't identify with them - which, again, kind of proves the point that bright yellow is much easier to identify with for light-skinned people
I wonder if it's possible to avoid that. What if at the outset, we'd used a different color for every emoji? Smile could be green, frown could be blue, wink could be yellow, etc.
not true.
asians are a lighter tone: https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Osaka-Flu...
carl is black: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/2/29/Numbe...
the hispanic bee guy: https://img.chilango.com/2014/11/el-hombre-abejorro.jpg
What does that mean though? I see Fat Tony as Italian-American, Rainier Wolfcastle as Austrian, and Akira as Japanese. The majority of the population of Springfield, which is supposed to be somewhere in North America, is probably "white".
So the context of the show itself, and how characters are portrayed imply their race/nationality. This is not true of an emoji.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got a really nasty email accusing me of being all sorts of racial things, because I hadn't included skin tones. I don't know if this person was just trolling or crazy or what, but they were really mad! I'd never received an email like this before, so I was pretty upset.
1: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...
It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages.
After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard:
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-re...https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf
Based on this, the Consortium refined it into their own proposal that used the Fitzpatrick scale for skin tone modifiers:
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p...https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdfhttps://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf
And then, eventually, these were included in Unicode 8.0.
Dead Comment
What this shows is if you inject the concept of racial self-identity onto cartoon symbols, and afford people a way to navigate that selection, people can do that. Not that anyone wanted this, or that this feature is beneficial.
This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null.
But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
And now we have superheroes band aids, Elsa band aids, transformers band aids, teddy bear band aids.
It started out with the 'base' symbols of a bunch of Japanese mobile carriers:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#The_origin_of_emoji_pict...
If they simply stuck with supporting those for legacy reasons, then things would have been fine. But no line in the sand was drawn.
IMHO there should be a moratorium for (say) five years to let things settle, and see new ones are actually needed, or if it's just inertia driving recent additions.
Coloring Black and Asian characters with skin tones, means that yellow in the Simpsons represents only white people.
awfully confident take.
And what would someone use a handshake emoji for exactly?
Deleted Comment
I am not a fan of how Unicode has treated emojis, but there is no question they are completely within scope in principle (they were part of extant keitai character sets) though the way they are being extended by the UCS makes me uncomfortable.
But so what? People like to use them which seems like enough justification.
[0] https://emojipedia.org/docomo/
[1] https://emojipedia.org/softbank/
edit: although to be fair to Softbank, it seems their initial color version had pink faces https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/
With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation.
TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.
I doubt this was solely Americans or that Americans are the only group of people that care about race/ethnicity. Maybe your findings are different. Please let me know where to find your publishings.
Yellow codes for the default, which is whiteness. Or said another way, white skin is the only unracialized skin color. Thus the supposedly neutral yellow stands for it.
Dead Comment
I 100% agree. But technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.
Male child + Yellow + ZWJ + Gender Neutral child + Yellow + ZWJ + ...
And then it builds up the family emoji from the inside out.
And declined to make RGI: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114r-family-emoji-explor....
Deleted Comment
But to use some emoji (e.g. facepalming) I must gender that speech, and therefore myself. I'd prefer not to have to do this, especially to relative strangers on the Internet, so I appreciate that "person-facepalming" is becoming available on more platforms.
It'd be nice if the gendered variants were collapsed a bit (like the skin color variants) to reduce clutter.
I suppose in the future there will be people that refuse to interpret emojis...
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
emoji's are part of text communication in the same way facial expressions and body language are part of oral communication. Yes, sometimes they'll be misinterpreted, but the same is true of text alone anyway (were they being sarcastic? Are they angry?)
That's exactly what emoticons were meant to substitute: non-verbal communication. The problem is that some use them as hieroglyphs.
I think you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. It is true, emojis can be an important part of communication but until the same graphics start being used on all platforms, devices and services, emojis are a quite bad medium for communication. My phone, my browser, whatsapp, slack, I think twitter too and so on use their own graphics™ which have subtle differences.
Why not? Why do you care about the effort other people put into things that they care about? To such an extent that you’ll put effort into criticising things which are of literally no relevance to you?
> Clear text is just so much less confusing.
Yeah nah.
Just because you’re not hip to it doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. I don’t understand most slangs, whether in my own mother tongue or in foreign langages I more or less understand.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to assert cockney rhyming slang or verlan is “meaningless”.
The problem with emoji is that there is no dictionary, no standardised meaning or interpretation guidelines; no unified, context-dependent cues that everyone subconsciously agrees to. When you try to communicate non-verbal cues using them, it works well because there is a general understanding of what is meant though even there, cultural differences sometimes get in the way. Something like a smile cuts across cultures pretty universally.
When emoji start getting overused to the point where you have to draw meaning from the skin tones involved in a handshake, that's a step too far IMHO. This is precisely why we struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics and precisely why emoji must remain a supplement to language, not a replacement for it as many use.
We should strive for less people overall in software with a better sense for quality, than getting everybody to pile more junk on this dumbster fire that is computer science.
Another story is when you write with them and instead of a formatting tool become your words.