• forestbeasts@pawb.social
    21·
    6 days ago

    I’m a wolf (furry + therian) and I use the wolf emoji a lot! ✨🐺✨

    But… I’m really lucky that there even IS one. A lot of people aren’t so lucky.

    So yeah. More emoji is a good thing, particularly more animal emoji. We really need emoji for more species.

    – Frost

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    9·
    7 days ago

    It’s 2026, and I still have a hard time seeing major gains from emojis.

    They are maybe useful for something like Twitter, where people had artificially-constrained message lengths, and wanted to pack as much information into as few characters as possible, but that seems like a pretty niche use.

    I get that conversational text has reasons to want to add information that normally comes out-of-band, via tone or expression, but it’s not clear to me that that requires emojis. I’ll use an emoticon for that. There’s a pretty small number of emotions that one really needs to indicate, so even if one wants to use an emoji, there just aren’t all that many that one needs.

    I think that there’s a case for a heart emoji. I certainly have seen people embedding hearts in handwritten text, so people do want to do that. I don’t, but I think that providing a way to do the same thing in typed text as one does in handwritten text is certainly reasonable.

    But…the overwhelming majority of emojis just don’t have an analog in handwritten text.

    On phones using on-screen keyboards, where text entry is slower, it might be faster to pick out an emoji than to write an associated word…but if that’s the goal, present-day phone on-screen keyboards also typically do predictive text, which is a more-general solution to the problem.

    I think that having Unicode include characters for various languages is nice, lets one embed quotes from various languages together. Line-drawing characters are convenient for monospace-font text stuff. I like having some typographic characters, like printer’s quotes or em- and en-dashes. Superscript characters and subscript characters.

    But I’ve just never really benefited much from emojis. They don’t really hurt much, but I don’t feel that they’ve provided much of a benefit, either.

    • Iconoclast@feddit.uk
      7·
      7 days ago

      Emojis are symbols I attach to messages to signal that I’m not angry at you, I didn’t mean to offend, everything is fine, I’m just joking etc. Basically they’re tools to try and avoid misunderstandings.

    • jtzl@lemmy.zip
      1·
      7 days ago

      I would not have guessed a comment in this thread would make me think but here we are…

      I have a relative or two who reply with emojis, and it grates on my nerves. I think people often use emojis in place of full thoughts, and I seriously dislike that behavior. Further, a couple times you think it’s a shortcut, but before you know it, that becomes the full thought. Frightening.

    • CameronDev@programming.dev
      9·
      7 days ago

      Ah, but you see, there is a seahorse emoji:

      🐎

      Wait no, that’s not it, this is:

      🐎

      Wait no, that’s not it, this is:

      🐎

      Wait no, that’s not it, this is:

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      One minor thing that I am not super enthusiastic about when it comes to emojis is that they are typically colored. This has two drawbacks:

      • In a number of environments, it’s possible to set text color. This is only really practical because most characters are not colored, so the color can be variable. If we start introducing colored characters in general, that stops working. It also has at least the potential to create issues for colorblind users (though we could potentially also create workarounds).

      • It means that onscreen text may not be practical to present well in a monochrome environment, like a monochrome e-ink display or printed on paper. Traditionally, if you can see text onscreen, you can print it and it’s still legible on a monochrome printer. But, for example, there’s U+1FA75, LIGHT BLUE HEART: 🩵, and U+1FA77, PINK HEART: 🩷. Most non-sight-impaired users can probably distinguish between the two on a color display, but I suspect that a situation where one was using it to write text — maybe using blue to indicate male and pink to indicate female or something like that — wouldn’t be very easy to distinguish after being printed on a monochrome printer.

      Both of these are kind of minor complaints. In practice, I just don’t see a whole lot of emoji use, and haven’t run into practical issues. But I do think that if we wanted to adopt a writing system that incorporated color, I’d probably favor a more-considered approach than just throwing whatever someone happens to propose in.

      One other minor issue is that some emojis have political or social weight that get people upset. For example, you have U+1F52B, PISTOL.

      Some people felt that people shouldn’t be able to portray an actual pistol, so changed the thing to a water pistol. I personally think that the whole debate is kind of absurd, because one can just write “pistol”, but it clearly has been a topic of political infighting.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji

      The pistol emoji (U+1F52B 🔫 PISTOL) is an emoji defined by the Unicode Consortium as depicting a “handgun” or “revolver”.[1]

      It was historically displayed as a handgun on most computers (although Google once used a blunderbuss);[2] as early as 2013, Microsoft chose to replace the glyph with a ray gun,[3] and in 2016 Apple replaced their glyph with a water pistol.[4] Since then, its rendering has been inconsistent across vendors. Microsoft changed its glyph back to an icon of a revolver during 2016 and 2017, before switching it to a (differently-styled) ray gun; in 2018, Google and Samsung changed their devices’ rendering of the emoji to a water pistol,[2] as well as the websites Facebook and Twitter. In 2024, Twitter (by then known as “X”) chose to restore the glyph of a handgun, although instead of a revolver it used a semi-automatic M1911.[5]

      Based on the above, it looks like Elon Musk moved things back to being a classic American handgun.

      But, point is, you have this political spat and platform inconsistency going on (where the imparted meaning of someone’s text might reasonably change based on how the Unicode characters are portrayed) where it’s not at all clear to me that anyone ever had a particular desire to embed a pistol in text in the first place, be it a water gun or semiautomatic pistol or revolver or whatever.

      I’ve seen people arguing about the skin color of characters in various emojis. In text, I can just say “sad person” without attaching addition information, but if I have a visual representation, then I have to choose things like the skin color.

      It just seems like room for friction that doesn’t really need to exist.

      Oh, and another point — one of the things that initially seemed to me like a great application for Unicode emojis is flags, because in theory, those are designed to let one identify a country at a distance, and often people look at lists of countries. But…there are actually a lot of flags that look really similar to each other or are even identical, like the flag of Romania (U+1F1F7, U+1F1F4: 🇷🇴) and the flag of Chad (U+1F1F9, U+1F1E9: 🇹🇩). I remember some Romanians a bit back poking fun at some Romanian politician who had inadvertently used the Chad flag in some important post on social media. I’d imagine that it’s more-obnoxious if someone decides to do it in, say, a menu for country location. Like, in most cases, I think that it’s probably preferable to use the ISO country codes than flag emojis if you really need a short form, or to just write out the name of the country fully.