As a recent observer of a discussion wherein the dramatic differences between single, double, and triple-dot sentence terminators were argued, I think concerns about emoji facial expressions might be valid, but resolving them would still leave us in a world of crisis and division..
Humans came up with a way to express musical notes on paper. To me that seems much more challenging. The list of common emotions is not that numerous. We need some shortcut, compact way of expressing them in writing. It would go a long way to score, or markup our words with some sort of emotion meter.
Perhaps thats what music is to singing. Just maybe a visual way of doing that. Emojis are hard to use.
I'm not disagreeing, but note that humans have not come up with a way to express musical notes in Unicode or Emoji. The second vertical dimension is critical for music notation.
I'd suggest that the same idea applies to nuanced facial expressions. You could certainly devise a set of glyphs to stand in, but they would have to be learned by everyone.
The failures we see today are attempts at rendering expressions on drawn faces -- and to be fair, even a high res photographic still image of a real human making an expression could be easy to misinterpret. Especially across cultures and subcultures. My 15-year old niece has very strong opinions on how many periods I use to end sentences..
I think "fixing" emoji is probably a lost cause. But I am biased since I don't care at all. The most interesting and amusing thing I know about emoji is that when Apple changed the "gun" from a realistic-looking Glock/etc to a toy squirt gun, all the ingrates who used the image in a threatening manner ended up looking silly to iOS users. Android followed quickly.
I support the same sillification of negative and angry facial expression emoji as well, FWIW, and I think it's probably hopeless to try to cram nuance into any of them. Fortunately, we still have words.
I also find (thumbs up emoji) and (ok emoji) to be somewhat ambiguous. I see them as potentially sarcastic. Really, sarcasm is the biggest barrier to effective online communication.
