Emoji, Emoticon, Smiley, to the average user these are all the exact same thing. They mean "fun inline image in my text". Technical people dismissing the Robber or Seahorse emoji as a Mandala Effect is actually a great example of not diagnosing the root problem, aka _not listening to the customer_.
I had massive, massive packs of custom icons installed into my Trillian client going all the way back to the early 00's. So did my friends, and we all knew it. Anyone new to the friend group was installing packs right away too so they could get all the fun jokes that were only applicable if you had the right emoticons installed. Here's [1] an example of a phpBB board distributing their custom icons as Trillian emoticons, so their members can keep the vibe going no matter how they are chatting.
The whole world did not fantasize a Robber emoji. We sent robber smileys. We sent and received gun emoticons, seahorses, aliens, etc. What changes is how those symbols are communicated. The feature shifted from being a local-only token-to-img replacement operation to being encoded in the character set that is delivered, and in that version rev of the "Fun images in text" concept, commonly used pictographs were left behind.
I had massive, massive packs of custom icons installed into my Trillian client going all the way back to the early 00's. So did my friends, and we all knew it. Anyone new to the friend group was installing packs right away too so they could get all the fun jokes that were only applicable if you had the right emoticons installed. Here's [1] an example of a phpBB board distributing their custom icons as Trillian emoticons, so their members can keep the vibe going no matter how they are chatting.
The whole world did not fantasize a Robber emoji. We sent robber smileys. We sent and received gun emoticons, seahorses, aliens, etc. What changes is how those symbols are communicated. The feature shifted from being a local-only token-to-img replacement operation to being encoded in the character set that is delivered, and in that version rev of the "Fun images in text" concept, commonly used pictographs were left behind.
[1] - https://www.nightscrawlers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9745