this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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If the color is what's bothering you the most, there are black and white emoji fonts out there. For example, Noto Emoji.
I get where you're coming from, and don't entirely disagree, but at the same time I'm grateful to emojis for spurring interest in and adoption of Unicode. The situation a little over a decade ago was much different, with many devices supporting only ASCII. It was also so much more complicated to use a computer for multiple languages, with so many different encoding standards. Nowadays Unicode seems to work well for most languages. And users have come to expect support for it on whatever platform they're using. Even if it's true that some users only demand that support due to emojis, I certainly don't want to go back to how things used to be.
Unicode support is great - and necessary for a lot of stupid emoticons, as well. But even without emoji there'd be dumb shit like post titles in fancy fonts, or... usernames with each letter in a blue rectangle.
That kind of thing becomes an arms race for attention.
Reddit had a ton of problems, but it was a relief getting away from people spamming HTML gimmicks in titles and comments. That is a cultural issue more than a tech issue. The same stupidity is possible even just doing ALL CAPS YELLING. Emojis specifically get namedropped and rejected because of how egregiously they stand out, and the low-effort responses they innately encourage. Like if you had a second keyboard that could only type LOL, ROFL, LMAO, etc.