Post #3955443

@skyglowberlin@fediscience.org "Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?" - As of now, once they're in, they're in. The code point in Unicode is then reserved for this symbol. This can be a problem because emojis are kind of open-ended (other than alphabets and many other symbol lists). And it's possible that some emojis turn out to be rarely used. I could imagine that eventually some platforms just stop supporting a certain emoji - but it's really useful to have an international encoding standard which is fully supported by most technology (as anyone who has programmed or written online text in the early 2000s can attest). That's why getting a new emoji approved has become so hard - we're basically creating a kind of tech debt for a potentially long time. Funny story - you could try creating a post now with a Unicode character from an "empty" code point in the emoji range, in the hope that it will get assigned in a later round. I've seen such a post on the old Twitter, which later was filled with all kinds of random emojis, when you look at it in a few years. #linguistics #emojis #WorldEmojiDay