Putting emoji in unicode was a mistake.

@wolf480pl why?

@arguil Well, for one, 32 bits were supposed to be more than enough to accomodate any past, present and future writing systems, even fictional ones, but, thanks to emoji, we have almost run out of codepoints already.

@wolf480pl

@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.

@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)?

@arguil

@josemanuel @arguil

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?

@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 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