As you can see from the reaction to your question, a lot of users view lack of emoji as a feature rather than a bug. HN is known for being a very simple, text-based site. HN is viewed by many as one of the last bastion of the old internet, and adding emoji would be likely to result in forks and a civil war. I would imagine that adding emoji is a very low priority, if not an intentional design.

I don't miss emojis on the site but there is something to be said for the idea of HN being fully Unicode compliant, consequences be damned.

Hacker News doesn't even comply with the barely extant layout standards of the early web that it emulates, and the anti-modern contrarian establishment here is weirdly proud of it.

I don't want to play 'guess what this means' when I read comments here. I'm too old to waste time figuring out if someone is talking about an eggplant or a phallus, etc.

Let other sites cater to people who want to post memes and emojis. I doubt their lack irritates people who like them nearly as much as their presence irritates people who do not.

Cause people will abuse it and and a dozen 100 emojis to their messages - please keep the status quo

You fear emoji because of their immense power. :0

I think the main problem is that they're too attention grabbing. Especially in a UI in HN where everything else is plain text, an emoji would have so much visual weight your eyes would have trouble focusing on anything else on the page. Forbidding such visual grenades helps keep the focus on the content.

It have colours. Which is too much of visual stimulation IMO. I am OK if they are black and white.

Because it’s expected that you’re smart enough to use your words.

Because we'd like to keep hacker news from slowly devolving into its lesser gifted cousin Reddit.

It is too late for that.

It's not that bad yet.

Last bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do like we did in the bbs era and pre Unicode emoji standard and use ascii compliant smilies

maybe they're using utf8_unicode_ci instead of utf8mb4_unicode_ci on their mysql database :P

it's probably a manual filter

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I'm pretty sure they're writing s-expressions to disk but maybe things have evolved since I last looked.

There are good security reasons, among others to filter some unicode;

Homoglyph : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

UniCode 'Confusables' Visual-Spoofing : https://unicode.org/reports/tr36/#visual_spoofing

The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor : https://certitude.consulting/blog/en/invisible-backdoor/

>There are many other characters that look similar to the ones used in code which may be used for such proposes,

  (e.g. “／”, “−”, “＋”, “⩵”, “”, “⫽”, “꓿”, “∗”). Unicode calls these characters “confusables”.<*

Looks like reddit is leaking here lmao

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

The HN guidelines.

Oh sorry for that, didn't realize.

This is very accurate. Hopefully everyone is chill and explains their reasoning.

I'm not trying to be mean, but if you think emojis would be appropriate here, I don't think you understand the site you're on.

This behavior is by design

Obviously, but why?

They're typographically awful and they're unprofessional.

If you have to ask there is no way I would want you to be able to use emojis!