I actually just learned about the “Elephant Test” recently. Apparently the Unicode Consortium compares a suggested emoji to an elephant when considering notability; only something that’s about as well-known as an elephant passes the test. So I think the religion has to be as well-known as an elephant to get an emoji, which feels like a fever dream of a sentence to type.
I was honestly not expecting to be called out on this, let alone twice! Well, I guess I shouldn’t be terribly surprised that thinky nerds on Lemmy listen to a thinky nerd podcast hosted by a thinky nerd.
I got curious and tried to look up all the different religious emojis. After Judaism (with 14.8 million Jewish people per Wikipedia), from what I can tell the next smallest religion with an emoji is Sikhism, with the khanda: 🪯 Wikipedia says there are 25-30 million Sikhs, so I guess somewhere between ~15 and 25 million? Big hurdle for an upstart religion to overcome.
Although that doesn’t seem to have helped the Mormons, who have ~17 million followers. But I also don’t know of any special symbols they have outside ones shared by other Christians (like crosses).
I was laughing because I thought you meant this: ❌
TIL there are religious emoji. That’s crazy. Is there a rule of how big a religion has to be before they get an emoji?
they literally have my religion 69ing ♋️
unfortunately I am currently non-practicing😎😎😎
I actually just learned about the “Elephant Test” recently. Apparently the Unicode Consortium compares a suggested emoji to an elephant when considering notability; only something that’s about as well-known as an elephant passes the test. So I think the religion has to be as well-known as an elephant to get an emoji, which feels like a fever dream of a sentence to type.
That actually sounds like a good test.
Question is, is there an elephant Unicode character?
https://unicode-explorer.com/c/1F418
Ol’ big ears African elephant stealing the thunder…
You could argue that some of the designs are of Asian elephants: https://emojipedia.org/elephant#designs
Fellow Tom Scott “Lateral” fan, eh? :)
I was honestly not expecting to be called out on this, let alone twice! Well, I guess I shouldn’t be terribly surprised that thinky nerds on Lemmy listen to a thinky nerd podcast hosted by a thinky nerd.
Hey, I also listened to that podcast episode today.
Tap for spoiler
It’s Lateral with Tom Scott
You seem like a guy who would know a lot about emoji notability.
I got curious and tried to look up all the different religious emojis. After Judaism (with 14.8 million Jewish people per Wikipedia), from what I can tell the next smallest religion with an emoji is Sikhism, with the khanda: 🪯 Wikipedia says there are 25-30 million Sikhs, so I guess somewhere between ~15 and 25 million? Big hurdle for an upstart religion to overcome.
Although that doesn’t seem to have helped the Mormons, who have ~17 million followers. But I also don’t know of any special symbols they have outside ones shared by other Christians (like crosses).
There’s already a hat emoji.