Some time ago, I noticed that youtube comments are copied without emojis, thought nothing of that - bugs happen - but today I finally decided to find out why and what the hell is even this.
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Absolutely ridiculous. For a company that touts web technologies down our throats all day, this is mind-boggling.
That sucks.
I’d guess that what they were probably trying to do is make things work for random user who doesn’t have a font with said emojis installed and has no understanding of how to fix things.
Still seems like it’d be better to only fall back to rendering images if the user doesn’t have a suitable font installed; I’m pretty sure that that’s doable.
Might be possible to revert the change with GreaseMonkey or something like that.
if the user doesn’t have a suitable font installed
Then they can just download the font. No need for images.
I bet this is about making the emoji animated or something
Unless your on a mobile device and that’s not an option.
Why wouldn’t it be? I don’t mean install it, they could just download it on page load like other fonts
I guess webfonts would work.
Bruuhhhh whyyyy
It takes a lot more effort, leading to some developer keeping his job. Also, it increases the maintenance cost, again leading to some developer keeping his job.
Consistency. They don’t want to be at the whim of your font (which for many users will be the OS default). While it’s not frequent, sometimes Apple (iOS) or Microsoft (Edge) will have a very different interpretation of a Unicode emoji, which makes the UX of comments containing those emoji inconsistent between YT users.
That’s what webfonts are for
I have been in meetings which people who thought the fact that a user could use a different font, even only intentionally, was “unacceptable”.
I hope those people aren’t directing the ship at YT, but could be.
Then they can grow up and add alt text
If things work like twitch and they have custom emotes when you ‘join’ a channel as a paying member, it might also just be for consistency in how they handle the common free emotes and channel-specific emotes.
I think if they just filled the alt= attribute with the emoji this would copy fine.
They could have gone the webfont way instead…
Odds are they did it so everyone would have uniform emojis. Would also enforce the gun to squirt toy change. Also it may be a remedy for the fact that android updates suck ass. A new phone may never be updated and be stuck with old emojis. Google should have learned by now to abstract away the hardware drivers, but that would make too much sense.
You do realize you can load fonts with emojis, right? Does this work on mobile devices?
Would also enforce the gun to squirt
What exactly does it matter to be stuck with old emojis? Why is it important for them to be perfectly uniform?
When they look different people interpret them differently.
Wtf Microsoft?
The ones in MS Teams are so cursed. I use it for work and I swear everything about that app is peak catering to boomers.
Also made by boomers perhaps?
They changed this a very long time ago
That’s really interesting, I didn’t realise the problem was that bad. I did the quiz at the bottom, tried to answer honestly and only got 5 out of 14 correct.
I got 7 and even then that’s only because half way through I began to notice a theme on the really obscure ones with long names.
These are ridiculous, they often bear no resemblance at all to their supposed meaning wtf? Slanted closed eyes with steam coming out the nostrils isn’t anger it’s… “Triumph”!?
Would love to see actual use vs intented use on that one lol.
Yeah, that was a particularly egregious one! Triumph? Triumph?!? Ok then…
Mind you, emoji were created in Japan, so a lot of the original ones can be weird to us due to cultural differences.
And this is exactly why emojis suck and should never have been invented
I guess that makes more sense now that I see an example. I just can’t fathom how any Apple artist thought they made a “grinning face with smiling eyes” when they looked at that image. It’s “grimacing face with smiling eyes” very obviously. I thought all representations were like the others in this example - they all look like a “grinning face with smiling eyes”. They look different but it doesn’t matter.
I still think though that if there weren’t obvious mistakes like this, it doesn’t matter how the “grinning face with smiling eyes” exactly looks, or any other emoji for that matter.
It’s clearly another way to wall the apple garden further, to the point where you don’t get to communicate in an effective way unless you both have an iPhone.
That isn’t what the grinning face with smiling eyes ever looked like on iOS. I have no clue where that article got that. And it’s not what it looked like on other platforms either. They have their emoji confused and so you can’t even trust the survey at that point. Here is the history of the emoji across platforms. https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes#designs. And I’d say that google’s emoji versions look bad compared to the iOS versions. Samsung’s are horrendous though.
And just for comparison here is the grimacing face history. https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face#designs
That’s interesting. I wonder how true that still is today, given the study was done in 2016. The study also pointed out that even on the same platform, people on average interpreted the same emojis differently. I’d be interested in an updated study conducted among younger Gen Z to see if being completely raised in the digital age has created various emoji languages, especially across cultures (which they mention they wanted to do at the end of the article as well).
When they look different people interpret them differently.
Ah, paralinguistic communication is always like this. Once you change the symbol ever so slightly, the meaning being conveyed also changes.
hieroglif over kanji
Hieroglyphs and kanjis are still linguistic in nature. So no matter how you write a specific unit it’ll be interpreted the same, as long as recognisable as that unit. Here’s a Japanese example:
sure, they’re written in slightly different ways, but they’re still the same ⟨愛⟩ /ai/ kanji, so it’s still conveying the same meaning (love, affection).
Emojis on the other hand aren’t typically used to convey a language, even if conveying meaning and found alongside language. That’s what makes them paralinguistic (beyond language), they’re a lot more like “mmhmm, ah!, ahn?” grunts or Italian hand gestures than like kanji or hieroglyphs. And in this sort of paralinguistic system, even little changes on the symbol change its meaning.
And… well, that’s what we’re seeing here, and the likely reason YT replaced unicode emojis with images. For me at least it’s convenient, might as well uBlock them.
This was a great explanation, thanks.
That’s aweseome! Now you can set up uBlock to remove them. Love it.
You could block the Unicode text string before as well.
So we’re back to emoticons now?
What’s old is new again…
But it’s FAANG company, they know how to do best /s
it’s because on web people would get different designs according to which operating system is used. Marketing prefers uniformity. They could load a webfont, but color font support is not really universal and because people use always the same 10 emojis it’s faster to load only those cached pngs compared to a full webfont with 3000 emojis that aren’t even used in that specific page
The web font would also be cached, and it wouldn’t be that big of a resource in the first place. I think being able to copy a comment’s content is more important, but whatever.
But I’m INFURIATED tho!
all emojis should be blobcats and blobfoxes.
Still liked emoticons better. The emojis all look cursed. But i am sure someone will misinterpret those too
