Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Yats

Apparently there's a new craze. Yats. A Yat is a singular collection of five emojis. A super-emoji. You can choose your five emojis, combine them into a Yat and use it as a social media signature. Or even your username.

Each Yat is unique so, once you have bought your Yat, no-one else can have that combination of emojis. I don't know how many possible combinations are possible because I don't know - or care - how many emojis there are in existence.

Note that word 'bought'. You have to purchase your Yat. And that may cost you tens of thousands of dollars, payable in some kind of cryptocurrency I think. Although presumably you can sell your Yat in a few months' time in the online Yatmarket and make huge profits. Or losses.

It's like going to your local rubbish dump, picking up hundreds of dirty, useless items, packaging them in groups of five items in shiny coloured foil and selling them as unique works of art on eBay. Equally valuable contributions to society.

Compare this with Wordle. I've never used Wordle but it was created to allow people to use the power of the internet and smartphones to simply have some fun - for free. Whoever created Yats - I'm not going to name them because they don't deserve recognition [although, come to think of it, I'm writing about their product] - are guilty of egregious greed, exploitation of the free resources of the internet, creating an unsustainable bubble, you name it, there isn't a cultural crime they haven't committed.

But, if you're rich and stupid, give it a go; have some fun. Yats were designed for you.

And yes, I know, the Wordle creator sold out to the New York Times, so maybe from now on providing people with fun may become less of a priority. We'll see.

No comments:

Post a Comment