Putting emoji in unicode was a mistake.
@arguil
it's not a joke, it's a genuine sentiment.
I do not claim to have a rational argument for it. @josemanuel seems to have one but I couldn't verify it.
I'll try to think of why I think putting emoji in unicode was a mistake, but for now it's just a vague feeling.
@wolf480pl
> I do not claim to have a rational argument for it. @josemanuel seems to have one but I couldn't verify it.
When I said we had almost run out of codepoints, I didn't mean that literally, BUT my point was, and still is, that we were promised to never, in thousands of years, run out of them, and the fact is that, at the current rate of growth, we might even see, in our lifetimes, the need for a new, 64-bit coding system. And all because someone thought it would be a good idea to use a bunch of redundant images as if they were letters and important symbols.
Also, emoji defeated the design principles of Unicode. Why do we have several shades of a hand gesture when Unicode explicitly avoids that kind of thing for letters (i.e., there are no codepoints for the cursive letter a, as opposed to the roman or bold versions. In other words, Unicode separates the symbol from its representation, but with emoji we have the complete opposite)?
Also, in case of language and glyphs, usually standardization follows use, and for a good reason. But unicode's approach in this case seems rather backwards - they standardize 100s of emoji and then hope people start using it?
And if you look how emoji evolved - it started with combining ASCII or kana characters in ways which resemble faces, but through their use in specific contexts, these emoticons have accumulated meaning beyond the face expression they represent. That's not something you can get through a new, freshly codified character.
And if you codify the already established ones, you effectively freeze them and prevent their evolution through creative addition of existing characters.
Also, if you look at how people use emoji, most of them use a small subset of the unicode ones, plus some site-specific ones like 
. And when someone searches for some obscure unicode emoji like 🌵 it doesn't feel genuine, cause that emoji doesn't have that accumulated meaning beyond its appearance.
Which is why I think all emoji should've stayed custom emoji.
The result of which is that not all emoji are added to the Unicode standard and there's no actual reference implementations if you want to support all Unicode characters anymore because every font supports different kinds of ZWJ emoji.
@wolf480pl There are actually three Private Use Areas (with hundreds of thousands of codepoints available) in Unicode that could have been used for that very purpose, that is, application-specific symbols.
@josemanuel @arguil
but then the emoji would be called "U+F0874" instead of "blobcatthinking", so it wouldn't gracefully degrade when you copy-paste it, try to use it in an app that doesn't have it, or in a real-life conversation.
When you casually say "blobcatthinking" out loud, everyone in the ingroup knows what you mean.
When you say "U+F0874" nobody has an idea...
@wolf480pl Being application-specific changes nothing about that. More than one application can assign the same codepoint to the same symbol for compatibility.
As long as all those codepoints are part of a PUA, and not of the official Unicode standard, there'd be nothing wrong with several different implementations agreeing on using the same ones.
@josemanuel @arguil
yes, but
msg.replaceAll("", "<img src=\"emoji/blobcatthinking.jpg\">")
is IMO even better.
I especially like how Twitch handles it - when you view the chat through a web browser, you see all these channel-specific emoji.
But when you join the same chat with an IRC client, you just see people saying "kappa" and "ttekHeart" and you still know what they mean despite your client not supporting these particular emoji.
@josemanuel @arguil
(I hope edits propagate - I forgot mastodon will replace my regex with an actual blobcat thinking)
You don't need to hope in the slightest about people starting to do new degenerate things.
People saw the emoji and immediately started using such degeneracy for degenerate things.
@Suiseiseki ok, when did you last see someone use 〽 ? And what do you think they meant by it?
@wolf480pl @arguil Oh, here's another argument: the use of emoji sets us back some 2500 years, when alphabets (a short list of abstract symbols that could be combined to form meaningful words and sentences) started beating ideograms (a _huge_ list of complicated symbols that vaguely resembled real world objects, each with their own meaning) as the superior form of written communication. Who in their right mind would want to go back to that?
@josemanuel @arguil
yeah that too.
Emoji originally developed to signal non-verbal communication through text channels. But they covered things that are hard to express through language, like :) and :P.
But if you start adding emoji for nouns, instead of - you know - emotions, then yeah that's a step backwards.
@glitch The Japanese had to invent syllabaries to make Chinese somewhat palatable. That really means nothing. Ideograms are still the inferior writing system.
@josemanuel @glitch @arguil I think.that requires an argument independent of "we stopped using them".
"Chinese still uses them" is not an argument that ideograms are good, just like hospitals still using WinXP isn't an argument that that OS is good. But "we're no longer using them" doesn't mean what we have now is better (see Saturn V)
Kanji is very effective in instantly communicating what is meant, albeit at the cost that when something falls outside the designated list, you basically get a combination of two characters that are meant to be read as one word.
It also generally means that people can express themselves while taking up less space in places limited to them.
The disadvantage is mostly that it can be a pain to learn and with such a massive list of characters, there's going to be characters that resemble each other.
(Japanese Twitter as the chief example is often far more descriptive than English twitter since for them, 280 characters isn't that big of a deal, while English twitter is a challenge in trying to communicate as much with as few words as possible.)
Why do we have several shades of a hand gesture when Unicode explicitly avoids that kind of thing for letters (i.e., there are no codepoints for the cursive letter a, as opposed to the roman or bold versions)
you’re right there are definitely no codepoints for stylised versions of the letter a (such as cursive or bold)
https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=a none whatsoever, unicode explicitly avoids that
@josemanuel@qoto.org @arguil@framapiaf.org @wolf480pl@mstdn.io it's not even close to 32 bits
each plane is 16 bits, and there's 17 of those (for encoding of ~20 bits of codepoints (limitation because of UTF-16)), and currently 10 of them are entirely unused and two designated as private use areas.
There's still a fuckton of space to add characters.
@ignaloidas You obviously missed the rest of the conversation, spongeman. Go soak in it and, of course, feel free to correct me if you still think I'm wrong.
@josemanuel Hey no need to insult my friend!
The fedi tends to be bad at showing the same set of replies to everyone, the argument @ignaloidas seems to have missed is:
https://mstdn.io/@josemanuel@qoto.org/110100273711438594
@wolf480pl I didn't mean it as an insult. He's the one who called himself “information sponge”! But, still, I'm sorry.
@josemanuel @ignaloidas @arguil
oh, right, information sponge. Guess I overreacted
@wolf480pl@mstdn.io @josemanuel@qoto.org @arguil@framapiaf.org I've seen it, and I still don't agree with it 😛
@josemanuel@qoto.org @wolf480pl@mstdn.io @arguil@framapiaf.org I read the rest of it
We now have almost all of the past 5000 years of writing systems codified in less than a 10th of the space we set to ourselves to have, and if we stopped caring for UTF-16(as we should), we could easily double the space or more. Emojis simply will not grow enough to exhaust the usable space - we already have multiple photographic character sets in it that have grown for thousands of years in parallel, and this is just one set that is growing for the entire world at the same time. It simply won't grow that much, believe me. Especially since combining the characters is codified.
@josemanuel @wolf480pl this is a joke right? Is this whole thread a joke and I'm the only one who can't tell?
Social media was a mistake.