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.

  • einlander@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    2 years ago

    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

    • tmpod@lemmy.pt
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      2 years ago

      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.

    • bss03@infosec.pub
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • qisope@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • bss03@infosec.pub
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          2 years ago

          I have been in meetings which people who thought the fact that a user could use a different font, even only intentionally, was “unacceptable”.

          I hope those people aren’t directing the ship at YT, but could be.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • Victor@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Absolutely ridiculous. For a company that touts web technologies down our throats all day, this is mind-boggling.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • Lojcs@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      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

  • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Still liked emoticons better. The emojis all look cursed. But i am sure someone will misinterpret those too