Why can’t I use emojis on HN?

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 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

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.

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

Looks like reddit is leaking here lmao

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