The process is described here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#process

The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.

kinda mad guillotine got rejected, it concisely expresses a very popular sentiment

I'm more disappointed that "Dumpster Fire" hasn't made the grade four times.

Would controversial emojis even get widespread support? Look at what happened to gun emoji.

"Dumpster fire" is a idiomatic phrase in English/US, so may not be universal enough.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire

I'm not an American... but "bin fire" seems to be a thing too.

Which is really the root problem with emojis: they're a top down definition of what concepts you are allowed to communicate.

If you're only allowed to communicate in emojis, I guess? Other than that I'm not sure what bearing emojis have on what I'm allowed to talk about.

"Gun", "knife", and a fair number other emoji's are nerfed.

Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.

Ah yes, because outlawing wrongspeak prevents people from communicating those concepts. People like you are giant eggplant emojis.

Preventing people from "communicating those concepts" is your strawman, not the goal of the Unicode org. Regardless of whatever lip service they might give to "This little thing, plus Santa's naughty list, will magically make all the children nice" fantasies. They are a big org, doing normal big org things, and trying to dodge the Bad PR spotlight.

But glancing at your karma - are you contributing to a platform (HN) which outlaws wrongspeak, when you should start truly living your values?

In the spirit of the discussion I'll respond in image form: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...

Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.

Do you assume that a stalker would be deterred by the lack of a knife emoji? I can't seem to follow the logic here.

oh that was me who wrote the proposal for it.

https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji

thank you for trying!

They should all have been declined. Emojis are not text and have no place in a text encoding standard.

:)

𓂺

Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.

Even on Hacker News.

The big difference between text emoticons and emojis is that emoticons are not defined by a committee.

RFC 9078 stans in shambles

Ugh, I really don't care for their selection process. Emoji should be open source even though that means there will be nazi emoji and porn emoji, it should be up to the user which ones they use. The selection committee seems like a very arbitrary group and many of their decisions seem equally arbitrary.

I don't know if you've ever used even remotely popular slack instances, but I'd say the flood of new reactions people are constantly adding on the slack instances (including corporate ones) I've been on is not something I'd want to see repeated for emojis.

Useful feature though, but just for limited audiences (not just Slack of course, Mattermost does this too). We have a grammar Nazi flag, a rubber duck, and an animated dancing banana.

I like it! And I've been guilty of adding my own.

But yes, limited audiences. Exactly that.

Is the Grammar Nazi flag the Grammarly logo but with a swastika instead of the G?

This one is a stylised black square 'G' rotate 45° on a white circle in a red field. Definitely off-colour dev humour for internal use; but that has its place.

At that point just have a messaging standard that allows in-line small images.

It's only a matter of time until Unicode adopts embedded SVG.

Yeah, basically. I'm thinking of something like stickers on messaging apps but without the oversized graphics.

This has been already brought up multiple times with multiple different proposals, all of which were unsatisfactory to this date.

See Private Use Area perhaps:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas

On your private site with your private client you can stuff whatever symbols you want for any particular code point I guess (§ Vendor use).

https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html has a list of factors for inclusion (example: “is legible and visibly distinctive”) and a list of factors for exclusion (example: “is overly specific”)

I don’t think Unicode.org has a nice list of rejected proposals, but examples are easily googled, for example https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-propos...

Unicode's list of emoji proposal status: https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html

>Are there any more heart emojis?

I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394

...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters

:big-hypocritical-grin: please

What happened to the smiley-holding-heart emoticon?

It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...

Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.