Emoji Is a Mistake

Mixing images with letters was a terrible idea. One may object that emoji are widely adopted and used by a vast amount of people. But the correlation between quantity of usage and quality of idea (and implementation) is so weak, that it’s not a proper argument.

It has created a lot of unnecessary problems, like different appearance on different platforms. Or time inconsistency, like the burger or the gun emojis that had been changed.

By the way, there was a gun. A proper gun, now replaced with a toy pistol.

Why? Maybe it’s because someone decided that small image of a proper gun can harm someone. But why some permutations of [g,n,u] or [a,e,n,o,p,w] sets of letters aren’t banned from use? Looks infantile.

Next — a color of humans and types of families. Attempt to be inclusive of diversity resulted in terrible technical implementation, also failing to include every possible combination. And why there is no way to define eye color, height, age and other important (for someone) properties that make them unique?

Why there is only that given set on animals, which does not include my beloved pet cockatiel bird while the nasty dove (I hate them!) is in the emoji set?

Right now it’s a little that can be done to solve the issue, but let me try to imagine how would I do it. It’s quite hard to come up with a proper solution because the idea of mixing text and images itself looks weird. So I just will not.

Originally published at tabakerov.name on June 1, 2018.