Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An App
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an entertaining story of a joke side project growing out of hand, brought up in threads on emoji and side projects.
What it is
Tom Scott and Matt Gray talk at Electromagnetic Field about making Emojli, an emoji-only messenger that began as a joke, how it was built and why they never want to do it again.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2019.
What Hacker News said
Recommends qwertyuiop924 · 2016-12 · on “Why emojis are failing to evolve into a form of language”
Tom Scott talked about this when he and Matt Grey made Emojli, the Emoji-only messenger. You can find their talk about it at [this video] However, given that HN is startup central, note that if you are involved in startups and easily offended, you might want to give this video a miss.
Recommends angus-prune · 2018-11 · on “Rot8000”
There is a wonderful talk by the founders of emoj.li about how it was all a joke which got out of hand. [this video]
Recommends jedimastert · 2019-10 · on “How Untitled Goose Game became a real video game”
For another entertaining "This went much farther than expected" but for two people who already had full time jobs and no desire to leave them, make a start up, or start a new business in any way, see Tom Scott and Matt Gray's Emojli: an emoji-only messenger app [this video]