The Unicode emojis I use most often on other sites that offer emoji responses are:
And
So they are available in other permutations.
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There are also skin-tone combiners that I think are supported by Unicode. Some apps (including Slack and Zoom) let you set a “default” skin tone, that it’ll apply to all the relevant emoji. Those apps aren’t using native Unicode emoji, but I seem to recall that Unicode does support setting skintone in individual glyphs.
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Oh, these must be new shiny things.
I have come to enjoy the different reacticons here.
We still need the puke emoji, mind…
(Ambassador, you spoil us)
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Well, of course, Unicode does support gender and skin tone modifiers on person emojis. So the generic yellow “person facepalming” can acquire any combination of five realistic skin tones and two genders:
Person: 
Woman: 
Man: 
(not pictured: Camera, TV)
But I’m not sure these are particularly relevant for reactions. Do we need a breakdown of who facepalmed to a post by gender and skin tone? Unless we simply prefer the art of one of the specific variants over the generic one (I don’t particularly care so long as the icon conveys the reaction).
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Whether we do or not, there are definitely individuals on this forum, including myself, who would prefer to be able to emote using icons that are something close to their actual skin tone.
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Then we should go for the one that is a Black woman, since it doesn’t matter?
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I don’t suppose there’s any such thing as a neutral skin tone, either here or IRL.
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There really isn’t, I don’t think. But for a long time, white dudes were meant to be stand ins for all of us, whatever our gender, race, etc. Of course, as many of us are now aware, the realities of other people are quite different than white dudes. It’s not that all people don’t have overlapping experiences in a number of ways, and can be representative of the overall human experience, it’s just that the rest of us have been expected to just white dudes as THE default human for a long time now, and it would be nice to think that other’s experiences are just as representative and can be stand ins for all of us in a way…
I don’t know… maybe the general emoji set we’re using can have a variety of skintones within them? 
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I’ve been on other Discourse message boards where all you can do is give a 
, just like the old days. Maybe that’s what should happen here.
Too many options, too many problems.
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It’s what we used to have here.
I like having the option to express rage or sadness to a story that a “like” would not do justice to.
Took me a while to come around to it.
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Me too! I think the extra reaction emojis ARE a value-add. I just think we can have them with some diversity, too.
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Yep, I think the mods have done the exact right thing by going with “person shrugging” etc. Which I guess is as neutral as they can get.
When I try to find an emoji (not a common occurence) the woman/man/person emojis are all the same shade of yellowish.
I like the choice, but I wouldn’t want it to be too stuffed full of choices - takes me long enough to choose as it is.
Still need the puke emoji, mind…
ETA The first non-bright yellow emojis I found:
Zombie!
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Going by the discussion here, I don’t think everyone agrees it’s the most neutral? I don’t think it’s the problem of @orenwolf and who ever else decided on it, because it is indeed listed as “person” rather than “man”… @bucaneer above noted that it’s apple’s designs, so that’s the culprit. I’m assuming that’s the only option? They also noted the variety of skintones available under “person” (in that case facepalming).
But yes… we still need that puke emoji! 
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I imagine that the only way to give diversity to the emojis would be to add a bunch of fields to each user profile for each of the different emojis that display skin. That would probably mean that the program would have to do a db lookup every time it displays the emoji count, for each and every message, unlike now, where it just keeps track of the number of the different reactions.
And since a yellow skinned male shrug is numerically different from a brown skinned female shrug, you could end up having a message with 5 different shrug emojis displayed, all different colors.
Alternatively, there could be a setting in your profile that says you prefer the light skinned female emoji, and so every emoji from everyone would be light skinned and female, regardless of the preferences of the person who chose the shrug emoji in the first place.
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Follow-up on reactions:
Looks like “non-hearts” are counted as “hearts” now - and displayed double.
When you get a “user y has reacted to X of your posts” notification, check it out.
I think the mot juste here and now is Verschlimmbesserung.
(What I’d really like would be “agree”/“disagree” buttons.)
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Oh, yeah! That’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?
Agreed. But then, I’m not the target audience for the emoji reactions.
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I think that would go badly.
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Something is off here, it should work… possible reasons are:
- Rate limit from CNN to our servers cause they are not “happy”
- CNN blocking our user agent
- Some bug
Do you mind opening a bug topic on meta.discourse.org and we can try to debug on it. (ideally the more examples the betterer)
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The emoji counting comment reminded me, there’s a glitch in the “most popular links” counter.
If I right-click on the image and it opens, I see the count go up by one.
But if I left-click on the link and select “open in background,” the count doesn’t go up.
Is that something that can easily be fixed?
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