* yeah I know technically the Unicode Consortium, but Apple pushed it hard
Authors can now bundle emotional sentiment in text communication. Not being able to do this in the past was usually just an annoyance but could occasionally turn out to be extremely problematic. Countless miscommunications have occurred due to recipients not correctly interpreting an author's tone, and we now have a tool that can help reduce or potentially eliminate those misunderstandings. It's early days, so we're still seeing teething issues: different emoji sets conveying subtly different cues and evolving social norms around their use. But they have incredible potential.
I also don’t use contractions in formal writing settings. Does that make them bad?
But no matter the reason for the complete lack of emoji, the fact that you like this site enough to participate here is evidence that emoji don't actually improve public discussion as much as you think they would.
There are many many sites on which you could have chosen to participate where emoji are common and can be used freely.
Whatever point you're trying to make, this is an extremely ineffective argument for it. You’re in “checkmate, atheists” territory here.
Nothing about the comment you are replying to implies an abstinence from face-to-face conversations, and the suggestion is not very plausible.
I provide equally ridiculous examples of how engagement in a venue that restricts things has no bearing on whether or not those things are generally useful. It simply means that society has agreed those things aren’t appropriate in every context.
Again emoji 1.0 was good. You can convey what you need with a small subset of that even. But even if modern computers were limited to emoji 1.0, I suspect they'd have been equally spammed to the point of losing meaning anyway.
There is also the pistol[0] which depending on the platform is a water gun or revolver.