I like them. I use them infrequently because they’re a bit of a hassle to use with the piefed interface, and I haven’t bothered to install an emoji picker on my desktop, because I use them so infrequently. But I am a big fan of how they augment written language.

I tend to use them as tone carrying punctuation if I’m making a joke or expressing a particular emotional meaning 🙃 It’s rare for me to put an emoji anywhere but at the end of a sentence 🧓 Emotions are hard for me to convey at the best of times, and text-only communication makes it harder 🤷 and emojis can fill in somewhat where tone and cadence would in verbal communication.

It’s not a perfect analog and the medium of emojis is still so new that the meanings vary a great deal, to say nothing of how different emoji “fonts” can convey vastly different meanings. For example, the emoji “😕” can express a wide array of emotional states with particular mouth and eye attitudes, the orientation of eyebrows if they’re included, etc. A comment that says one thing in one font can express something quite different in another. It’s a problem we’ll need to sort out, eventually, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s top priority at the moment. Emoticons suffer less from that problem because the glyphs are more standardized: regardless of font, everyone recognizes “:)” as “generic smiling face”. Between that and the fact that I can render text emoticons without having to open another dialog or application, the vast majority of my emotes are text-based :)