Emojery has a few unusual ideas behind it: a public record of every reaction, a checking tool anyone can run, a sign-in with no password. The other pages here explain them properly. This one explains them simply, no jargon, nothing you need to already know.
Emojery is a small add-on for your browser. Once it's installed, a little button appears on the pages you already read, next to the site's own Like, Star, or Upvote, and that button lets you react with any emoji you want, not just the ones the site offers.
Everyone using Emojery sees the same reaction counts on the same page. That's the whole product: a thin extra layer of reactions on top of the web you already use.
Everything below is about the second half of the job — making sure the numbers in that layer are real.
Think about any number you've seen under a post: 40,000 likes, 300 upvotes, 5 stars. You have no way to check it. It's whatever the company's computer says it is. If it went up overnight for no reason, or quietly went down, you'd never know. Every one of those numbers is a promise, and you either believe it or you don't.
Emojery is built so you don't have to believe anything. Here is the whole idea in 4 steps.
Picture a notebook where every reaction gets its own line, in order, forever. Nothing is ever erased and nothing is ever edited. Changed your mind about an emoji? That's a new line saying so. Deleted your account? That's a new line too, and it takes your old reactions back out of the totals. The count you see on a page is just this notebook, added up.
The notebook is public. Anyone can download the whole thing and read every line. Nobody's name is in it: reactions are labelled with a code that changes over time, so the record can't be used to follow a person from page to page. The formal name for a notebook like this is a transparency log, and how it's built is on The transparency log.
A notebook we hold is still a notebook we hold. So, regularly, the whole thing is squeezed down into a single short string of characters. Think of it as a fingerprint of the notebook at that moment. Change any line, anywhere in the history, and the fingerprint comes out completely different. There's no way to fake it.
Those fingerprints don't stay on our servers. They're published to a separate public folder on GitHub called
emojery-log, copied into public archives run by other organisations, and eventually stamped into Bitcoin. That last one is the point: we can change our own database, but nobody on earth can change an old Bitcoin block. So if we ever
rewrote the notebook, every fingerprint we published before would stop matching — in public, permanently, for anyone who bothers to look.
Saying "you can check it" is easy. So there's a separate free program, the verifier, that does the checking for you. It downloads the notebook, adds up every reaction itself, and compares its own total against the number the site shows. It also re-does all the fingerprints and confirms they match the ones published outside.
It's deliberately not part of our website or our extension. It's its own open-source project. Anyone can read the code before trusting it, or run their own copy on a schedule and watch us daily. It gets no special access; it sees exactly what you see. What it checks, step by step, is on The open-source verifier.
Honest limits matter, so here's the edge of the claim. All of the above proves what's in the record and that nothing was quietly removed from it. It can't prove that a reason we give for removing something is truthful, no amount of maths can prove that anyone is being honest about their motives. What it can do is make quiet abuse very hard: reversals apply to an account's entire history, not to one inconvenient vote, and they show up on a public feed anyone can watch.
If reacting needed nothing at all, a single person could sit down and turn into a thousand voters in an afternoon. Fresh browser profiles are free, instant, and unlimited. Real email addresses that actually receive mail are not, and that difference is the entire reason for the sign-in. It isn't registration in the usual sense; it's the cheapest available way to make one reaction mean one person.
You type your email once. We send a verification code. You paste it back. That's it: there's no password to invent, forget, or leak, because we never create one. We also deliberately skipped the Google and GitHub sign-in buttons: those would tell Google or GitHub that you use Emojery, and a small reactions add-on has no business adding a line to your profile at a company like that. The full reasoning, including what we gave up by choosing this, is on Passwordless sign-in.
After the code is delivered, the address itself is thrown away. What's kept is the result of running it through a one-way scramble: a fixed string of characters that can be produced from your email but can never be turned back into it. That scramble is what recognises you as the same person next time. We cannot look up an account by email address, and neither could anyone who stole the database.
An add-on can normally ask your browser for permission to run on every website you will ever open. Most ad blockers and password managers do exactly that. Emojery doesn't have that permission. It names the 9 sites it supports, plus its own, and the browser flatly refuses to load it anywhere else. On every other page you visit, it isn't running at all. Your browser shows you the same list, taken straight from the add-on's own file; our marketing can't touch it.
On a supported page it reads the page for 2 narrow purposes: working out where the button should go, and working out which item you're reacting to. That reading happens inside your browser and stays there. What leaves is small: an anonymous question asking "what are the counts for these items", and, if you react, the address of the item plus the emoji you picked. Nothing you type is read. Private pages get no button at all. The permission-by-permission breakdown is on Browser permissions.
There's no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no data buyers, and the code is public for anyone to check. That's partly principle and partly arithmetic: Emojery is a donation-funded open-source project, so tracking you would be an expense with nothing on the other side of it. If you'd rather not take that on faith, the source code is right there, and Before you install answers the same worry with things you can check yourself.
Uninstalling takes 2 clicks and removes everything stored on your computer with it, because your reaction history was only ever there. If you made an account, the extension's own menu has a Delete account button: press it and your record is gone, and every reaction you ever left is subtracted back out of the public totals. No email to write, no support ticket, no "are you sure you want to lose your benefits" screen.
Words that show up on the other pages here, and what each one actually means.
A button for reactions the site never offered, counts you can re-count yourself, and a sign-in that costs you an email and nothing else. If you'd like any of it in full detail, every claim on this page has a longer page behind it.
