> as was shone with invite-only app,
Shouldn't that be "shown"? Or is it a pun?
Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
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Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#12William Gibson was ahead of the curve with this in Pattern Recognition and the idea of anti-marketing, where secrecy itself becomes the distinguishing factor in creating interest mostly of perpetually bored, shallow, bohemians and the plot centers around finding the source of deliberately hidden anonymous film clips.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#13Ugh, BI mangles the emoji badly: the breadcrumb turns each emoji into two of U+FFFE REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which suggests something turns it into UTF-16 (that accursed encoding that ruined Unicode by making the always-doomed UCS-2 live longer even though the just about uniformly superior UTF-8 was already available, and which persists in distressingly many languages), then tries to turn it into UTF-8 by iterating through each UTF-16 code unit rather than each Unicode scalar value. Then the summary and body of the article just vanish the emoji altogether!
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I’m fascinated to observe that Firefox Nightly on Windows is, when using a font stack that doesn’t include Segoe UI Emoji (e.g. the headline of the Business Insider article, and the body of https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement, but not the header of the statement), not emojifying the first U+1F441 EYE, but emojifying the second. I can’t think of any way this could not be a bug. (Update: found a report from about a year ago, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178 .)
Chrome is not emojifying either, which is reasonable when its font fallbacks hit some other font that includes EYE first.
For best results on things like this, include U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 after each code point to say “emojify it if you possibly can”. (See also U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15, which says “render it in the old style without colour, please”.) Then you don’t need to worry about whether the font stack hard-codes system emoji fonts.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#14"Most importantly, we raised over $60,000 in donations from people who hoped to get special treatment within our fabled waitlist." Isn't this basically fraud? "Hey, give us money and we'll help you get something. Nope, just kidding, we gave your money to charity and that 'something' we promised doesn't exist."
It's also interesting that this was timed right around the release of Parler, a Twitter alternative.
Parler is 2 years old and not exclusive. It just got popular this week thanks to some Twitter influencers and due to the founder requesting peot to join.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#15I'm pretty sure that emoji combination was in use for quite a while before this happened. Actually, when I saw it around Twitter I assumed it was people just referencing that or using it for its slightly surreality…
I've seen it used multiple times over the past few years on Reddit.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#16Another interpretation of the meme is that even for something pretty obscure, virality alone is worth about $20k/day.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#17I'm pretty sure that emoji combination was in use for quite a while before this happened. Actually, when I saw it around Twitter I assumed it was people just referencing that or using it for its slightly surreality…
I’ve seen kids using it on TikTok for at least 2 weeks
Their statement said this started out when a group of friends put the emojis in their profile after seeing it on tiktok, and then people started to wonder if they were all working on something together, so they ran with it.
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#18"Most importantly, we raised over $60,000 in donations from people who hoped to get special treatment within our fabled waitlist." Isn't this basically fraud? "Hey, give us money and we'll help you get something. Nope, just kidding, we gave your money to charity and that 'something' we promised doesn't exist."
It was more of a case of "Donate money to these causes and see what happens". Not fraud
I'd say it's borderline fraud. They've been retweeting app screenshots with that emoji combination on it[0], retweeting people saying someone took their "username on that emoji app"[1], and directly tweeted "we’ll see what we can do about an invite" if people donated and sent receipts. And now they're using this publicity to gain employment and sell merchandise.
This team mislead people to "support causes" and is now profiting off their newfound fame. I have nothing against non-profits getting more money, but...I'm not sure if I'm happy about this situation here. The ends really don't justify the means.
[0]: https://twitter.com/itsmezhi/status/1276617354013626368?s=20
[1]: https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12764265029435187...
[2]: https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12766503684207656...
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#19The statement is the most interesting part, in my opinion: https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement >In a strange way, this sort of became an anti-statement against what we’d all seen on tech Twitter. We’re a diverse, ragtag group of young technologists tired of the status quo tech industry, and thought that we could make the industry think a bit more about its actions. Despite calls-to-action like that “It’s Time to Build” e…
This is awesome, the revolt of the postmillenials
Re: Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also interesting that this was timed right around the release of Parler, a Twitter alternative.
Parler is 2 years old and not exclusive. It just got popular this week thanks to some Twitter influencers and due to the founder requesting peot to join.
Huh, I didn't know that. This week was the first I'd heard of it.