For real, I like old style emoticons way better than emojis. For a few reasons:
- Colour. Or lack of. They blend better into the text, I find the colourful emojis too distracting.
- Mix-and-match. The author mentions this with different words, but: you aren't bound to a specific set of icons, you create your own.
- More platform-agnostic. Every single corporation out there has a package with a different set of emojis, and what they convey might change because of those differences.
- I'm a millennial. I grew up with the old style emoticons.