[microcolonel]

> I feel you should have more empathy for people that do not look like you.

Quite literally nobody has bright yellow skin. Emoji are not human beings, they are エモ → e-mo → emotion 字 → ji → characters (update: apparently I've been misled, but not in a way which changes my point, see reply below). The codepoints do not contain, have never contained, and will never contain a racial identity. They are an abstract representation of universal human emotions, just as generic as single-line ASCII emoticons.

Nobody's racial identity was represented by Unicode emoji faces to begin with, and certainly nobody any less than me.

[Grue3]

Actually, "emoji" is 絵[e] (picture) + 文字[moji] (character). A lot of them do not represent emotions, but just random pictograms. In my opinion while encoding pictures as text was a good idea at the time (due to limitations of mobile text messages), it makes no sense in 2017 where we have technology to easily inline any picture in the text even on mobile phones.

[microcolonel]

> Actually, "emoji" is 絵[e] (picture) + 文字[moji] (character). A lot of them do not represent emotions, but just random pictograms.

Thanks, I really do wonder why people lie to me or make things up. I guess that's what I get for never typing it into my IME in full.

> In my opinion while encoding pictures as text was a good idea at the time (due to limitations of mobile text messages), it makes no sense in 2017 where we have technology to easily inline any picture in the text even on mobile phones.

Even at the time, the character set was apparently meant to replace common phrases and text emoticons (for SMS, as you note). There's frankly no way anyone would have the time and energy to produce high quality custom images for simple messages, save for selfies.

[grzm]

It's not hard to imagine people making that assumption, as it is reasonable if not correct, particularly as "emoticons" and "emoji" are often used to describe the same or similar non-character glyphs. There's no need to assume bad faith on others, any more than it would be to assume ill on your part for repeating it without confirming it.

[microcolonel]

Well, I suppose the fault is shared, but it was told to me confidently enough by somebody I would generally trust in these matters. I'm not throwing any particular person under the bus here, so I think I can be as emphatic as I'd like.

[sova]

Well, it is technologically possible yes, but we as humans often make the compromise for practicality and communication. Perhaps there are better tuned parameter glyphs that represent screens. ️

[bearbearbear]

What he said.

Also, what about people whose skin is a shade in between those provided by the skin color emoji?

I mean, if you're not representing those people you're being racist, right?