[kingcharles]

Have emoji not become part of our writing structure though? A decent percentage of online chats and comments, especially on social networks, includes at least one emoji that couldn't be easily or accurately represented in the regular written language.

[lmm]

Recently implementers of unicode have censored the gun emoji in a way that changes the meaning of many existing online chats and comments. So you can't easily or accurately represent things even with unicode.

Emoji have never been effective or consistent at conveying meaning; at best they convey something to someone in the same subculture and time period, and often not even that. Given that unicode implementers are ok with erasing the meaning of some of them, it should be ok to eliminate more of them.

[kingcharles]

> Emoji have never been effective or consistent at conveying meaning; at best they convey something to someone in the same subculture and time period

Isn't that the same with all words though? Think how much English usage changes in a generation. For instance, my girlfriend will use the term "I'm dead!" in a similar context to where I would say "LOL" and where my father would have said "What the fuck is loll?"

[lmm]

There's a spectrum. Subculture-specific slang changes quickly, but most words have a longer lifetime; reading Chaucer today is difficult but doable. Given that we don't encode words but only letters, for English you have to go back to the disappearance of þ to get a change that's relevant to text encoding. Emoji shift faster and are less effective at conveying meaning than any "real" language.