Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Emoticons used to be a supplement for words, indicating the tone of the words, but now emoji are a replacement for words, the ultimate illiteracy. People have been using things like "lol" and "lmao" since long before Unicode even existed, let alone emojis.
> People have been using things like "lol" and "lmao" since long before Unicode even existed Sure, but how are emojis superior to this? Text is universally compatible, whereas emoji introduce compatibility and versioning issues across browsers and operating systems. Besides the technical universality of text, it's also demographically universal. We've replaced "lol" with laughing-face-of-specific-skin-color-and-hair-…
To be specific, they introduce a lot more of such issues, but such issues were already there with plain text as well. Fonts that don't support some characters, fonts where some characters are displayed incorrectly (the whole CJK unification fiasco), fonts where some characters are not distinguished (I've run into the is-this-an-I-or-an-l issue quite a few times, personally).