You mean in terms of accessibility? The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text.

Apparently emoji aren't the greatest for accessibility: https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/emojis-and-accessibility/

It may be even worse for emoticons, so that's a legitimate criticism: https://uxdesign.cc/emojis-in-accessibility-how-to-use-them-...

> The good news is that Twitter, err, X gifs already have built-in alt text.

The bad news is that X's gifs' alt text is absolute trash most of the time. Stuff like "office stare gif" etc.

What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs.

To understand a meaning of a word/emoji/gif you have to see it in context several times or look up a definition. (with emojis and gifs there is additional problem in lack of dictionaries for them). When amount of words in a language is finite or they are extending slowly (emoji) I ma able to keep up with thier meanings as opposed to gifs and memes. Which are evolving to quickly for me to keep up.

> What you written about lack of scalability of emoji for me is their advantege over gifs.

What I mean by lack of scalability is that there is insatiable demand for new emoji but only finite Unicode code space for them.

This is has even become a social/political problem, because everyone insists on equal "representation" in emoji in terms of skin color, gender, etc. We couldn't just stop at Simpsons-style yellow faces.