The statement is the most interesting part, in my opinion:<p><a href="https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement" rel="nofollow">https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement</a><p>>In a strange way, this sort of became an anti-statement against what we’d all seen on tech Twitter. We’re a diverse, ragtag group of young technologists tired of the status quo tech industry, and thought that we could make the industry think a bit more about its actions. Despite calls-to-action like that “It’s Time to Build” essay we’ve all read, most of the industry (from product teams to VC) still stays obsessed with exclusive social apps that regularly ignore — or even silence — real needs faced by marginalized people all over the world, and exclude these folks from the building process. As an industry, we need to do better.
"Most importantly, we raised over $60,000 in donations from people who hoped to get special treatment within our fabled waitlist."<p>Isn't this basically fraud? "Hey, give us money and we'll help you get something. Nope, just kidding, we gave your money to charity and that 'something' we promised doesn't exist."
Ugh, BI mangles the emoji badly: the breadcrumb turns each emoji into two of U+FFFE REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which suggests something turns it into UTF-16 (that accursed encoding that ruined Unicode by making the always-doomed UCS-2 live longer even though the just about uniformly superior UTF-8 was already available, and which persists in distressingly many languages), then tries to turn it into UTF-8 by iterating through each <i>UTF-16 code unit</i> rather than each Unicode scalar value. Then the summary and body of the article just vanish the emoji altogether!<p>———<p>I’m fascinated to observe that Firefox Nightly on Windows is, when using a font stack that <i>doesn’t</i> include Segoe UI Emoji (e.g. the headline of the Business Insider article, and the body of <a href="https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement" rel="nofollow">https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement</a>, but not the header of the statement), <i>not</i> emojifying the <i>first</i> U+1F441 EYE, but emojifying the second. I can’t think of any way this could not be a bug. (<i>Update:</i> found a report from about a year ago, <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178</a> .)<p>Chrome is not emojifying either, which is reasonable when its font fallbacks hit some other font that includes EYE first.<p>For best results on things like this, include U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 after each code point to say “emojify it if you possibly can”. (See also U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15, which says “render it in the old style without colour, please”.) Then you don’t need to worry about whether the font stack hard-codes system emoji fonts.
Not a surprising outcome, considering that the general attitude in Tech Twitter is wanting to learn everything, to get in on the ground floor of cool stuff, etc. It's a harmless-ish prank since the money went to good causes and most people willing to donate just to get in on some app clearly have disposable income. Still misleading and not "victimless" but it's probably the most fun many people have had in this hellish year.
William Gibson was ahead of the curve with this in <i>Pattern Recognition</i> and the idea of anti-marketing, where secrecy itself becomes the distinguishing factor in creating interest mostly of perpetually bored, shallow, bohemians and the plot centers around finding the source of deliberately hidden anonymous film clips.
I'm pretty sure that emoji combination was in use for quite a while before this happened. Actually, when I saw it around Twitter I assumed it was people just referencing that or using it for its slightly surreality…
That article read like GPT2, not even GPT3. The same few points over and over for a dozen paragraphs. Didn’t actually explain why or how anyone donated money to this fake startup/charities
The lyrics from the music video that first created the emoji combo is pretty much this group’s thesis:<p>>Stop blaming twitter. Stop blaming black men. Just because you not getting chose.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s</a><p>Twitter, blm, exclusivity building hype from people who aren’t getting chosen to join. Honestly pretty eloquent.
For me - a guy who runs an emoji domain registration site - I've been sort of waiting for the right project to take off, so it becomes, like, a thing. Will this finally be our moment? (I wish I could put a shrug emoji in here...)
This was a very effective way to demonstrate the venality and homogeneity of techie PMCs. Unfortunately, donating that money to BLM is itself a manifestation of that venality and homogeneity.<p>If only we could devise a way to get money from the wealthy to fund projects that benefit the non-wealthy instead of the billionaire-supported NGO class...
If you want to try a thoughtful social network, you can checkout the one I'm building, Taaalk.<p><a href="https://taaalk.co" rel="nofollow">https://taaalk.co</a><p>It's a platform for long form text based conversations between closed groups (that everyone can read).