Why were the Unicode characters removed from this question?

Question

I answered this ps5 question that originally made use of Unicode characters in the title and the post (⭕ and ╳). In the edit history, I can see that the original poster wrote the question with these Unicode characters, but a Moderator edited the post to remove them. The original poster then put the Unicode characters back in revision 5, to which a Moderator rolled back to Revision 4, removing them once again.

Is there any reason to remove the Unicode characters? They seem valid given the context. Is there a stance on Unicode characters like this and their use within posts?

Answer 1

The unicode characters in question are the following:

U+2B55 : HEAVY LARGE CIRCLE {basic symbol for speed limit}
U+2573 : BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DIAGONAL CROSS

I can see a good argument here that these are simply not the correct characters for this purpose, even though they bear some resemblance to the controller buttons. But those characters certainly don't mean the same thing.

Unusual unicode characters also have a significant chance of simply not working in some settings. So there is a real drawback to using them.

If there were characters that actually represented the controller buttons I think it would make sense to use them. But using unrelated characters that resemble the buttons a bit is confusing at best, and mit actually just lead to empty boxes for some people when those characters are not available.