With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody
I think this article just makes the case for what incredibly terrible idea emojis are in general.
Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.
I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
I'm not sure that's any different from reading any historical text other than perhaps the abbreviated timeline. Written language always requires some context about when it was written to accurately parse, it's just less obvious for writing that isn't all that old. Modern prints of classic or historical writings sometimes have footnotes clarifying meanings that have changed over time; I don't know if it's happened yet, but I can definitely imagine a footnote clarifying e.g. "this tweet was written when the gun emoji still looked like a gun and this was meant to be more threatening than it appears now"
I really preferred the norm being text emojis. This whole thing with gender- and ethnicity- and now other-stuff-encoded emojis is just really awkward and forced seeming to me. A text smiley is just a smiley.
My favorite part of the AI overview is when it says "X is Y (20 sources)" and you click on the sources and Ctrl+F "X is Y" and none of them seem verbatim what the AI is saying they said so you're left wondering if the AI just made it up completely or it paraphrased something that is actually written in one of the sources.
If only we had the technology to display verbatim the text from a webpage in another webpage.
