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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

blog.emojipedia.org

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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#161

Post by photonthug »

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…

> This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles.

My first thought exactly. My 2nd thought, glancing at the graphic of like 6 years and 6 companies and the evolution of the emoji.. there's a nontrivial amount of money thrown at all this "work", and once you think about all the meetings and emails and design iterations, the opinion pieces on the result, etc, the frivolous spend for this kind of nonsense is probably in the millions. Not to mention all of us taking a media break while we're on the clock! No real political sentiment even needs to be involved.. all this probably just represents make-work activity by folks looking to justify their continued employment. The political aspect is just the hook, since the bike-shedding after that is guaranteed.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#162

Post by llm_trw »

deanCommie wrote: post #144
delichon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question isn't whether it was OK to turn the gun emoji into a water pistol in the first place. It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent. The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this. Having X "go back" because…

A bunch of busy bodies decided to change the meaning of a unicode character: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f52b/index.ht...

This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#163

Post by nebula8804 »

legitster wrote: post #38
hangonhn wrote: post #7

Wow. Microsoft's original version was a pretty good compromise. (they used a futuristic blaster icon)

It's kind of funny that Microsoft was ahead of the time, changed it back to match other libraries, and then changed it again to keep up. Just can't win.

We are seeing the design of their corporate structure in action heh

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#164

Post by lynndotpy »

xyst wrote: post #42
janandonly wrote: post #10

It looks as if Twitter could easily fire some more people and still keep operations up .

lol - I tried logging into my old twitter account and the app based MFA is broken. Wouldn't even consider the current state as "up"

I only use Twitter in the browser and on both mobile and desktop it's been very broken for over a year now.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#165

Post by AnimalMuppet »

theultdev wrote: post #111
giraffe_lady wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woke is good, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)#/...

That is a nice painting, actually.

It is.

It is also rather unconnected to "woke", at least as far as I understand woke. Woke to me seems to me more about shouting down people than it is about listening to everyone. (So does "anti-woke". I don't think the painting supports either side; it rebukes both sides.)

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#166

Post by bawolff »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #114
theultdev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> In no way does an emoji encourage armed violence. Obviously, in a vacuum, an emoji does not do anything at all. Though emojis are used in context to convey intent, just as words are. Would you say words do not encourage armed violence? Sure, the dictionary does not, but when pieced together, narratives can be created that do. That is not to say we should ban words, but lets not kid ourselves and pretend they have n…

But isn't that the point of the person you are replying to?

Its the meaning of the ideas being communicated not individual glyphs. A gun emoiji does not neccesarily mean "lets shoot up the place". A water pistol is similar enough to a gun that anyone who has that meaning in mind can easily just use it and be understood. Or they could just use something else with an understood meaning. After all, many emoiji have context specific meanings. An eggplant is not just an eggplant.

Its just downright silly to ban things at this level of abstraction. It wont stop people talking about guns.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#167

Post by roughly »

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…

It does have the benefit of making whatever X users decide to do with the gun look appropriately silly everywhere else.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#168

Post by xg15 »

listless wrote: post #147

This from a guy who unveils his new data center at exactly 420 and has a line of cars intentionally named to spell out “s3xy” and the reason we’re all forced to say “space sex” out loud every time we talk about a rocket launch. We are trapped in a meme.

What do you expect if society is hellbound to concentrate all power but none of the responsibility into the hands of a few billionaires and one of them happens to identify as a 13 year old memelord?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#169

Post by alephnerd »

I've noticed that culture war type conversations have become completely normalized on HN after the COVID pandemic.

These kinds of discussions never change any minds and are just a toxic cesspit of online commentators arguing against each other.

Why hasn't HN considered limiting these kinds of conversations. Almost 2-3 times every week I notice some kind of topic like this arising on HN, and infecting other conversations on the platform.

Furthermore, I have notice significant traction from accounts created post-2020 on these kinds of discussions unlike other discussions on HN.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#170

Post by maxwell »

listless wrote: post #147

This from a guy who unveils his new data center at exactly 420 and has a line of cars intentionally named to spell out “s3xy” and the reason we’re all forced to say “space sex” out loud every time we talk about a rocket launch. We are trapped in a meme.

"Comedy should be illegal again."
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