My experience from seeing emoticons used on Slack/Discord is that they help combat the muted signal problem of online communication, and thus actually reduce the toxicity of discussion.
People want to feel respected, loved, appreciated, etc. When we interact physically, you can easily experience subtle forms of these feelings. For instance, even if you just hang out in the same physical space with a bunch of other people and don’t really interact with them, you often get some positive feelings regardless. Just the fact that other people are comfortable having you around, is a subtle signal that you belong and are accepted.
Similarly, if you’re physically in the same space with someone, there are a lot of subtle nonverbal things that people can do to signal interest and respect. Meeting each other’s gaze, nodding or making small encouraging noises when somebody is talking, generally giving people your attention. This kind of thing tends to happen automatically when we are in each other’s physical presence.
Online, most of these messages are gone: a thousand people might read your message, but if nobody reacts to it, then you don’t get any signal indicating that you were seen. Even getting a hundred likes and a bunch of comments on a status, can feel more abstract and less emotionally salient than just a single person nodding at you and giving you an approving look when you’re talking.
My hypothesis is that the lack of such subtle “body language” signals is often the cause of toxicity, because generic likes feel more abstract and then people ramp up their outrage in order to elicit reactions and feel like they have been noticed. Whereas, in my own experience at least, the kind of somewhat personalized (in the sense of having been selected from a vast set) reacts on Slack/Discord do have some of the “body language felt sense” that makes me feel genuinely noticed in a way that a mere upvote doesn’t. (And the point of the signals being subtle is that they’re not major enough that you would normally bother expressing them in a comment.)
My experience from seeing emoticons used on Slack/Discord is that they help combat the muted signal problem of online communication, and thus actually reduce the toxicity of discussion.
My hypothesis is that the lack of such subtle “body language” signals is often the cause of toxicity, because generic likes feel more abstract and then people ramp up their outrage in order to elicit reactions and feel like they have been noticed. Whereas, in my own experience at least, the kind of somewhat personalized (in the sense of having been selected from a vast set) reacts on Slack/Discord do have some of the “body language felt sense” that makes me feel genuinely noticed in a way that a mere upvote doesn’t. (And the point of the signals being subtle is that they’re not major enough that you would normally bother expressing them in a comment.)