Oops, thanks. Well, that explains why I've never seen Emoji on Hacker News. And I've missed the edit window, so I can't fix my post.

Should have been:

> I don't mind characters like ((yellow smiling Emoji)) and ((thumbs up Emoji)) or even good old ︎((pre-Emoji Unicode smiley)) (which has always been too tiny for its own good). These work in black and white, in different artistic styles, and they're a fairly limited set.

> But now we're going down the road where we get new stuff like tacos and unicorns every year. And even though Unicode is an industry standard, the pictures need to look like Apple's bitmaps to avoid confusion, and the Unicode standard changes so often that you have to manually keep track of who can already see ((upside-down smiling Emoji)) and whose computer/phone/browser/messenger software is too old.