That doesn't add colour to, say, the smiley face, it just changes the colour from the default, usually yellow.
As well as adding colour browsers display emoji at a larger point size. It is really annoying when some pre-emoji symbol (like the phases of the moon in TFA) gets emojified and where your document had some discreet use of symbols it now has huge colourful icons drawing the eye.
And afaict there is no way of turning off this behaviour globally.
There are at least 7 variations of the heart symbol ️ differing only in color ️🧡, not including the heart (playing card) which also has multiple variations.
Edit: apparently HN limits the number of emoji per post, I originally included several.
Redundancy has never been a problem with Unicode. After the decision was made to add the symbols of the original encoding to the list of Unicode characters, they had to add all heart variation, otherwise it wouldn't have been able to be backward compatible.
Or alternatively add a color modifier? I'm not sure that would have been a better solution.
> apparently HN limits the number of emoji per post, I originally included several.
I am surpeised HN allows any emoji an all. Pretty sure they have been totally banned in the past. It seems like the orange heart is now (or has always been) whitelisted. 🧡🧡🧡
Seems a decent solution to me. Monochrome screens can just ignore the colour character.