Unicode 9 added a :shrug: emoji which I’d love to use right about now. http://emojipedia.org/shrug/ indicates that it’s available in all five of the standard sets available from Discourse (Apple, Google, Twitter, Emojione, Microsoft/Win10).
I’d love to see Discourse adopt all of the new stuff in Unicode 9.
For now, I’ll just have to copy and paste that katakana thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
P.S. Note that you can’t paste in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ directly except in code blocks; you have to escape the backslash with ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Discourse 1.8 is supposed to include newer Unicode stuff, see releases
Skin tone support for emoji
The current emoji set is the Unicode v3 release. Shrug is v4. I expect v4 will be part of the work done in Discourse 1.8, but I’m just an observer here.
Some previous discussion that might be interesting: