[hollerith]

I love how there are thousands of internet forums, but you're a heavy participant on a forum that is so militantly text-only that emoji are silently removed from user-submitted content. It's almost like the policy you are arguing against has important effects on conversation quality that you don't understand or that you don't want to admit because your paycheck depends on email messages' being rendered as HTML.

>Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

Approximately no one outside of HN even knows that plain text is a thing distinct from HTML. Among those that do, many probably couldn't give an example from their digital experience of a place where user-submitted content must be plain text. (They can navigate those places just fine, though.)

[haterforhire]

Given how long dang has been claiming that someday we won’t have pagination and everything will be fast, I’m guessing whatever arc garbage runs HN just couldn’t handle emoji 17 years ago or whatever and that’s what we are stuck with.

Basically, I don’t think it’s militantly text-only, it’s just shit.

[memefrog]

This link aggregator (it isn't a forum) would be shit if it allowed emoji.

[kalleboo]

You literally just used italic formatting in your own reply

[hollerith]

It's good to be vigilant against hypocrisy, but there is such a thing as being too focused on possible hypocrisy.

What HN does, i.e., allow comments to contain a couple of carefully-chosen formatting options, is not a realistic option in email whereas because of a history of decades in which email clients could render only plain text, asking email senders to send plain text is a realistic option at least in some situations.

In other words, HN's designers were not restricted to a choice between plain text and full HTML, but in email we basically are (because there is no central authority in charge of email).