Having a calm and well-mannered conversation doesn't mean much. It's possible to state the most outrageous and appalling opinions calmly and politely and then dismiss any passionate and emotional response as "uncivil". Most long-time HN readers will remember A Modest Proposal from one of the many previous times it has been referenced, which demonstrates this principle quite neatly by presenting a truly monstrous proposition in the calmest and most soft-spoken way possible to make a point about the cruelty inherent in the issue it addresses.

It's not necessarily always the form of conversation that's undesirable. Far more important is the content. HN has a bias towards form over content sometimes but it seems that in this case Dang clearly flagged it for content, not form.

Your argument looks like it can be summarized as:

1. Acknowledging racial categories is racist.

2. Acknowledging racial categories is harmful.

3. Skin tone modifiers acknowledge racial categories.

Therefore skin tone modifiers are bad.

But the first premise is already blatantly malformed: when most people say something is "racist" they either refer to prejudice and discrimination, or they refer to systemic injustices and power imbalances within society as a whole. Acknowledging that racial categories exist in our society is a requirement to acknowledge that racism in this sense exists at all and that it is harming people.

What you're doing instead is inverting the semantics of "racist" (1) so that it frames the entire basis for being able to talk about these injustices as bad and harmful. This only works because you know that "racist" has this established meaning of being something that is harmful, which is something you don't even bother establishing for your new meaning (2).

You also don't demonstrate the third premise.

People in other comments on this article have already pointed out that prior to skin tone modifiers these emojis were defined as being often presented as yellow but also often as light skinned by default and in fact if you look at the original Japanese characters they were often presented as yellow outlines on a white background, suggestive of light skin. Others have also pointed out that while yellow is often considered a cartoonish skin color because of The Simpsons, the show clearly used yellow as a substitute for light skin as it portrayed Apu, Carl and other darker skinned characters with shades of brown instead. So while a solid yellow rendering might not be as clearly "white" as a light skinned rendering, it was still suggestive of light skin.

But you don't make the argument that defaulting to implicit light skin is better than providing a range of options for specific skin colors in addition to the less specific default. You omit the argument completely and thus suggest the yellow would have been entirely neutral, which is demonstrably not the case.

And in fact you mostly avoid stating any of these premises explicitly at all even if your claim depends on all of them. This means any criticism levelled at face value will likely read as incoherent (because it attacks a conclusion based on premises that were never stated) or irrelevant (because it attacks the premises themselves despite your comment not including them).

But given how you use language in this comment and others, and the phrases you chose to sprinkle throughout, I'm fairly certain you know this. You're not interested in discussing whether providing skin tone modifiers was the right solution because you don't want people to even acknowledge the problem. You want to win based on appearances by provoking the other side into emotional reactions so you can claim to be rational without having to provide an actual argument or addressing any criticism.