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Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world rzadkie @lemmy.world 1 wk. ago

Youtube replaced unicode emojis with fucking images

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.

46 comments

So we're back to emoticons now?

What's old is new again...
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.
- What exactly does it matter to be stuck with old emojis? Why is it important for them to be perfectly uniform?
  
  When they look different people interpret them differently.
  
  https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/emoji-meanings-vary-hugely-between-platforms-meaning-characters-can-lead-to-vast-miscommunication-study-finds-a6980016.html
- You do realize you can load fonts with emojis, right? Does this work on mobile devices?
- Would also enforce the gun to squirt
That's aweseome! Now you can set up uBlock to remove them. Love it.
- You could block the Unicode text string before as well.
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
- 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.
- But I'm INFURIATED tho!
I think if they just filled the alt= attribute with the emoji this would copy fine.
Bruuhhhh whyyyy
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Then they can grow up and add alt text
  
  That's what webfonts are for
- 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.
They could have gone the webfont way instead..
Absolutely ridiculous. For a company that touts web technologies down our throats all day, this is mind-boggling.
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.
- 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
  
  Unless your on a mobile device and that's not an option.
Still liked emoticons better. The emojis all look cursed. But i am sure someone will misinterpret those too
But it’s FAANG company, they know how to do best /s
all emojis should be blobcats and blobfoxes.

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