As a POC I only care about the act of having to pick one. It's a chore. I really don't care if the default is the Simpson-y yellow color. Honestly, this kind of thing is such a non issue.

On the other hand, the dark theme could be kinda cool.

I feel exactly the same. Major bike shedding in my opinion. I prefer the yellow anyway. In a way, It allows others to focus on who I am, not what I am.

This is one of those things where you can’t make everyone happy. Similar to “disabled person” vs. “person with disability”

As a disabled POC, I personally don’t mind in either case, but also if at least one person feels more welcomed because of the change then it’s worth it in my book.

On the other hand, quite a lot dev time is spent in total on the whole emoji skin tone modifiers. How much dev time is it worth it to make that one person feel more welcome, and wouldn't there be other areas where this time would be better spent to make people feel more welcome?

The engineering efforts required to standardize emoji skin tone modifiers are certainly applicable to other use cases. Do you really think it's a complete waste of time?

To be honest ... I kind of do. It's not that I don't think the goals are a waste of time, those are great, but it always seemed to me that the much simpler approach of a yellow skin tone solved the same problem in a much simpler way. Similarly with the gender modifiers, a gender-neutral depiction always seemed like the better option to me.

I'm not a PoC and suddenly having a mandatory skin tone choice presented to me before I can use my emoji is making me uncomfortable, to say the least.

It feels like picking a light skin tone will be essentially sending a message that seems borderline crass and verging on culturally tone-deaf in the current circumstances. So I pick a Simpsons-yellow, because that's what I'm used to, what I prefer, and what draws the least attention to my skin colour.

I've never picked one. It's the best kind of option: I don't care and I never even knew it existed and someone who cared was able to select it.

Not everyone thinks it's harmless to cater to identity essentialism.

I also really appreciate the skin tone being a setting rather than having to pick the skin tone every time I select an emoji. This seems like an obvious thing, but some popular apps (cough hangouts cough) still haven't figured it out.

As a poc I could care less about emoji options. Just my 2 cents as other poc are also giving their 2 cents

Now reactions will be harder to count: instead of X neutrally yellow emojis there would be a bunch of every skin tone. I'm also kinda worried about accidently displaying statistics like "only people of certain race like this issue".

Overall, I feel that it's better to use only the neutral variant in reactions.

As a non-simpsonian person I have never felt bothered about emoticons being rendered bright yellow.