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.

  • @einlander@lemmy.world
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    1193 months ago

    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.

    • @Azzu@lemm.ee
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      473 months ago

      What exactly does it matter to be stuck with old emojis? Why is it important for them to be perfectly uniform?

        • SanguinePar
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          123 months 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.

          • @Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
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            233 months ago

            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”!?

            • SanguinePar
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              93 months ago

              Yeah, that was a particularly egregious one! Triumph? Triumph?!? Ok then…

              • KubeRoot
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                63 months ago

                Mind you, emoji were created in Japan, so a lot of the original ones can be weird to us due to cultural differences.

            • Concetta
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              53 months ago

              Would love to see actual use vs intented use on that one lol.

        • Lvxferre
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          113 months ago

          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.

            • Lvxferre
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              113 months ago

              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.

        • @Azzu@lemm.ee
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          53 months ago

          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.

        • @bassomitron@lemmy.world
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          33 months ago

          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).

  • @Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    373 months ago

    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

    • tmpod
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      153 months ago

      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.

    • @bss03@infosec.pub
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      303 months ago

      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.

      • Kairos
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        3 months ago

        Then they can grow up and add alt text

      • @qisope@lemmy.world
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        113 months ago

        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.

        • @bss03@infosec.pub
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          33 months ago

          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.

    • @intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      13 months ago

      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.

  • m-p{3}
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    233 months ago

    They could have gone the webfont way instead…

  • Victor
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    183 months ago

    Absolutely ridiculous. For a company that touts web technologies down our throats all day, this is mind-boggling.

  • @tal@lemmy.today
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • @Lojcs@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      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

  • @WraithGear@lemmy.world
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    133 months ago

    Still liked emoticons better. The emojis all look cursed. But i am sure someone will misinterpret those too

  • katy ✨
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    63 months ago

    all emojis should be blobcats and blobfoxes.

  • Semperverus
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    33 months ago

    So we’re back to emoticons now?

    What’s old is new again…