I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the charitable giving sector.

All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.

We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.

Sounds more like "Unicode support" or even "input sanitization" was the missing feature there. As long as you have bytes in = bytes out and you don't crash on unexpected input, you never need to know that emoji even exist to avoid these problems.

Yep, and this sounds even more fishy because the idea that no unintended unicode characters wouldnt be copied and pasted into a form field is a joke.

There are different levels of emoji support - and I totally agree that "not crashing when emoji enter your systems" is a vital one to have these days - as is preserving those emojis unmangled.

For me the parent commenter's phrasing of "first class emoji support" goes rather beyond that, e.g. with friendly emoji pickers, maybe reaction emojis, custom emojis, different skin-tone emojis, etc.

I'd view that bigger level of support as extremely optional for a transaction processing company like yours, though less so for a chat system intended for broad appeal in 2018.

I would love to read the post-mortem on this one!

Having used slack at a business, emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature -- they allow people to react without having to make a full-sized comment, which helps keep conversations compact.

> emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature

How is it better than just having upvotes and downvotes like what's done on websites like HN, reddit, and Slashdot? Personally, I don't see much value when seeing 5 different reaction emojis right under a comment I post in a Slack channel.

for instance: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/30/metoo/

There is nothing about emoji in this article.

I wish email had this feature. Sometimes I might ask someone to do something, and when they reply like "Done", it would be nice to just react with a thumbs up or something rather than continuing the chain of emails with a "Thank you" etc

Surprisingly, Office 365 Exchange + Outlook has this now. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/like-an-email-messa...

The article is very relevant, it's using "reactions" instead of a full "me too" comment or email.

Slack just happens to express reactions using emoji.

Times have certainly changed drastically. I remember when Google Talk was announced and the tech crowd of the day embraced it precisely because it didn't have emoticons (or custom fonts and colors, or games, or a host of other features MSN/AIM/etc. had and were beginning to be considered tacky). Maybe it's cyclical, and in a few years we'll be back to minimalism.

:) or nothing.

I know it's not the most popular, but I'm partial to =)

I've never minded =) but have always used :) for some reason.

You'd be surprised but I work at a company who has a product that is a Slack competitor in the business space (although they've repositioned to not go head-on at it any more..) and "doesn't have emoji/custom emoji" comes up A LOT. Probably the #1 most requested feature.