@josemanuel @arguil

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.

@josemanuel @arguil

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.

@wolf480pl @josemanuel @arguil If you want to make it even dumber, adding emoji to Unicode also resulted in about half a dozen non-emoji characters like the Zero-Width-Joiner and regional codes, which are intended to let you combine emoji and to be used to create country flags with ZWJs.

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 @arguil @josemanuel (err I stand slightly corrected - ZWJ is not actually emoji related, it's just been repurposed for that. It's original purpose is to allow for combining graphemes in Indian and Arabic languages. My mistake there.)

@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.

@arguil

@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.

@arguil

@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)

@wolf480pl >standardize 100s of emoji and then hope people start using it?
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?

@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.

@josemanuel @wolf480pl @arguil ideograms never went away - both Han (Chinese) and Kanji (Japanese) for example are presently used writing systems that rely on a "huge list of complicated symbols" (50.000 for both, with Chinese having about 20.000 in active use and Japanese having about 2.000 in active use).

@glitch The Japanese had to invent syllabaries to make Chinese somewhat palatable. That really means nothing. Ideograms are still the inferior writing system.

@arguil @wolf480pl

@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)

@wolf480pl @josemanuel @arguil There's advantages/disadvantages to both for what it counts.

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.)