Directional arrows read differently from text arrows
The eight compass arrows all carry Variation Selector-16, a hidden character requesting the colour drawing rather than the plain text one. Plenty of form fields and older databases discard it, and โฌ๏ธ then arrives as a thin black outline instead of the blue tile you sent. That is why an arrow pasted into a bio sometimes looks nothing like it did in the picker. The word buttons ๐ through ๐ have no such problem. They are single characters from the 2010 Unicode 6.0 release and render in full colour everywhere, which makes them the safer choice for anything that will be copied between apps.
Where each arrow actually works
โก๏ธ and โฌ ๏ธ do the heaviest lifting in captions, usually pointing at a swipe or a link. โฌ๏ธ points at whatever sits below the text, which works on a feed post and breaks the moment a platform reflows the layout. โฉ๏ธ has quietly become the reply arrow across messaging apps, and ๐ signals a repost or an update rather than literal rotation. For step by step instructions, the curving arrows read more clearly than the straight ones because they imply a sequence rather than a direction. If you want flat typographic arrows that survive username fields, the text versions are a different set entirely.
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