IMHO it’s a few things: It’s an ingroup signal, indicating (by “correctly” using emoji) that you’re part of a specific subculture to the recipient. “Praying_em

IMHO it’s a few things: It’s an ingroup signal, indicating (by “correctly” using emoji) that you’re part of a specific subculture to the recipient. “Praying_emojii flame_emojii YASS” indicates to me that the writer is young and hip. “Do you want to have a BBQ bbq_emojii ?” says to me that the writer is older and less hip. It can be hard to communicate tone through writing. Emojis allow one to instantly mark a piece of writing as informal/non-serious with minimal effort. This includes irony - “eggplant_emojii” is often a non-serious reply indicating that “I am jokingly acting like this this is sexual or attractive” It’s a proxy for longer writing. “Thumbsup_emoji” is a substitute for some marginally harder to articulate feelings of “looks good / I like it” Of course, there are many subcultures that use emoji in different ways and as proxies for other things as well. At a previous employer we’d often just send “taco_emoji?” to ask who was buying lunch. It’s the sort of thing that can be used/abused in many different ways.