I use emojis a lot in Slack and texting. They can remove some accidental ambiguity in your writing, by making your intent clear. For example, the tongue out emoji can work to make sure people know you're being sarcastic.
I've recently a colleague who used the tongue out emoji for sarcasm and the eye roll one for, well, eye rolling with disdain in reaction to something.
The first chat discussions were then quite awkward, because when I were to write something like "You should have tested your code before deploying it... :eyeroll:", he was thinking I was openly looking down on him in front of the team.
We had to have a real discussion about it. It made me tone down my use of emojis - and sarcasm. I suppose using animated emojis (they were in MSN I think?), or GIF reactions would have made the things clearer.
But why would you assume this works for a random stranger? It seems much more logical to assume they’ll interpret the thing you’ve written as being said while actually rolling your eyes.
That said, it seems entirely appropriate to look down on someone that doesn’t test their code before deploying.
My other colleagues were not confused by my usage of the emoji, although they've known me for some time now, and they know that I'm not the type of person to actually roll my eyes while talking to someone, or even look down on them.
At least it was a nice reminder that our ways, customs and habits, no matter how normal they seem to ourselves, can still look crazy from the outside.
But I agree with you, it may have been one of the best sentence to use this emoji with. :)
The official spec[1] calls it "PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS".. the keyword there is "person" (in contrast to, for example, "1FAC2;PEOPLE HUGGING" when there is multiple people). The emoji is of a single person folding their hands, which really isn't a high five unless you're somehow high five-ing yourself.
[1]ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt