Honestly, I don't mind the proliferation of emojis in casual online communication because it makes my favourite sort of bit much easier to pull off. Saying patently absurd shit in a perfect deadpan used to be hard to convey in pure text, and now all I have to do is punctuate and avoid using little cartoons.
It's actually kind of fascinating how expressing the formal register in textual communication has shifted over my lifetime. In spoken communication, the formal register is mostly about grammar and vocabulary, and this was once true of text as well, but these days folks will often use very formal grammar in casual text, counting on the fact that they're not captalising the starts of their sentences nor ending them with periods to establish that they're speaking in the casual register – and conversely, doing those things can establish a formal register even when one's word choices are conspicuously casual. We've basically evolved a formal register which is only intelligible in written form because it relies entirely upon orthography.
To the fluent speaker of contemporary textual communication, "fuck" and "Fuck." are completely different sentences.
