Gen z seems to have figured that out, too. They use emojis like punctuations, in much the same way we use lol. I was annoyed by it at first but I got used to.
I'm pretty sure Millennials never caught onto that because we either used emoticons, or were traumatized into thinking that emojis were somehow "girly". So the lol or lmao ended up being the way to show emotion/sentiment.
It was because there were all kinds of tacky and terrible looking emoticon packs back then, pretty much everyone agreed you looked like a dork. Nowadays they are used to produce shitposts.
Everyone who used them back in the day had malware too.
Google dawt cawm…
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Ooh, desktop strippers? Sweet! I’ll go ahead and get that too.
Oh no way, a purple ape assistant! Sweet, lemme git that. I’ll be ur buddy bonzi.
Remember porn dialers? They’d call 1-900 numbers in the background when your computer was idle and make parents really angry.
I use emojis when talking to specific people, lol with others and some I don't use any text slang at all.
Strangely because I grew up with lots of phpBB forums, the few of them that I still engage with for things like classic cars and farm talk I always use the emojis because that's what we always did :mrgreen: