Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always r

Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though. The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.