HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An App Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An App

60 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2016–2019 score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as an entertaining story of a joke side project growing out of hand, brought up in threads on emoji and side projects.

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.

“There is a wonderful talk by the founders of emoj.li about how it was all a joke which got out of hand.” (HN, 2018)

3 recommendations · Talks

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@qwertyuiop924 Dec 2016 Recommends
on HN thread 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.
Tom Scott on building the Emojli emoji-only messenger
@angus-prune Nov 2018 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Founders explain how a joke app got out of hand
@jedimastert Oct 2019 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Entertaining story of a side project growing beyond expectations

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close