Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

blog.emojipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 322 posts

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#131

Post by paxys »

chrisco255 wrote: post #121
paxys wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every side is pro censorship, just when it suits them the most. Look at all the book bans across conservative states, for example.

The book bans are only primary school libraries. I think this is fine, K-12 is mandatory, so clearly the state and local districts should have influence over what's allowed there. There's restrictions on religious teachings in school and likewise there should be limits on opinionated secular topics that don't advance reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. There's plenty of exposure to that stuff via other channels.

Censorship is censorship. The fact that it is happening in a government-run institution makes it worse. Like I said, everyone is for it when it suits them, and outraged when it doesn't.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#132

Post by rurp »

whalesalad wrote: post #92
tonymet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I would agree, but the platforms have also censored the gun emoji with the water gun .

I'm not sure why people call it censorship. Nothing is being censored.

If emojis are speech then removing a particular one sure looks like censorship. Many people do consider them a form of speech, both socially and legally. For example, a thumbs up emoji can be considered agreeing to a contract.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#133

Post by Dr4kn »

wongarsu wrote: post #86
whalesalad wrote: post #3

I wish that websites would stop overriding the emoji icons and just use the platform default.

The way different platforms render emojis can change their perceived meaning. The most famous example is probably the pre-2016 Apple version of "grinning face with smiling eyes" which looked like a cringing face than a grinning one [1]. Obviously Apple eventually fixed that one, but if you want people to communicate across platforms without misunderstandings you should really ship your own emojis that are consistent…

That reminds me again how much I love the Google blobs.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#134

Post by echelon »

Bluestein wrote: post #57
theultdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it alarming that the meaning of previous texts between many people could be altered by simply changing the glyph of an emote. And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best. What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions. I'm very much against it. It's t…

Next up, "semantic sanitation" by AI.- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. More in line with doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. Doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. You're doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. Doubleplusgoodthink".- "Doubleplusgood".-

That is truly horrifying, and I could absolutely see it happening.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#136

Post by mecsred »

whalesalad wrote: post #92
tonymet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I would agree, but the platforms have also censored the gun emoji with the water gun .

I'm not sure why people call it censorship. Nothing is being censored.

Like when cigarettes are replaced with lollipops in cartoons, you can debate if it does anything for kids or changes the meaning of a show or even matters at all, but you call it censorship. That's what it is, by definition.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#137

Post by Bluestein »

echelon wrote: post #134
Bluestein wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next up, "semantic sanitation" by AI.- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. More in line with doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. We tweaked your post a bit. Doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. You're doubleplusgoodthink now".- "There. Doubleplusgoodthink".- "Doubleplusgood".-

That is truly horrifying, and I could absolutely see it happening.

Indeed.-

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#138

Post by ben_w »

theultdev wrote: post #94
xk_id wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a thin veiled whistle blow against woke culture. The very concept of corporate-curated glyphs restricts and normalises communication to a limited range of concepts pre-approved by the architects of consumer culture. But apparently this is only a problem to you when it tries to discourage armed violence.

It's not a "veiled whistle blow", it's my personal belief. But yes, I am against woke culture at it's core, vehemently. In no way does an emoji encourage armed violence. Are you against violent video games as well?

Context is king.

The sentence "it's time to cut down the tall trees" doesn't seem like it should trigger a genocide, but it did.

If you send a firearm emoji in response to someone asking what they think of the 2020 USA presidential election result, that seems to be a fairly explicit encouragement of armed violence. A water pistol, not so much — likewise either "gun" variant in response to plans for summer holiday sports ideas.

When it comes to tall trees? Well, are you talking to an arborist or are you the RTLM in 1994.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#139

Post by delichon »

xg15 wrote: post #124

This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them? In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere . But the same codepoint showing up as a wa…

Disagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#140

Post by skrebbel »

ronsor wrote: post #17
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can use a custom font for your site that includes glyphs for the characters you need (eg: a gun).

Modern emojis are stored as fonts.

This is nonsense. A complete custom emoji font is something like 10MB. Shipping that to every website visitor is obscenely wasteful. This is why sites either just use native emojis, which all OSes support reasonably well by now, or download a little SVG for every emoji used.
Post reply on HN