Anecdotally, some people in this thread have stated that they’ve left or considered leaving due to either the 
emoji’s use or the trajectory of this discussion. I won’t name names because we have backscroll. Maybe the original poster spoke for a small minority who had been holding their tongues up to now. You might be right that they were among the dissenters when this emoji first came up for consideration, but it’s healthy to reevaluate such decisions from time to time. As it is, this discussion is undermining any fun that might’ve lent to previous discussions.
I don’t think raw usage numbers should be the determining factor in keeping an emoji reaction. (The value of 
is in its judicious deployment.) I can believe that reduces the need for 
or a flame, although the recipient might nonetheless interpret it as jeering, which would defeat the purpose.
The vast majority of times it occurs on GitHub, the 
acknowledges receipt without saying anything useful. A newcomer to a software project can be shy to report a bug because they don’t know if it’s just them or if anyone else is seeing the same bug. validates that the user isn’t being ignored. It would be a less problematic alternative to in general, but I’m pretty sure that, in some of this forum’s less frequented categories, the availability of would reduce the likelihood of a helpful reply. The lack of a “duly noted” reaction forces us to decide on the spot whether to craft a real reply or let it go. After all, this forum isn’t a bug tracker.
The problem with some emoji reactions is not that they can have multiple interpretations. That’s a problem with emoji in general. Just look at this conjugation table; how is this even a functional language?
 |
Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | |
|
| 2nd person | |
|
| 3rd person | |
|
As long as this forum supports Unicode, we will all have to cope with emoji. But it’s one thing for an emoji to appear in running text and another for it to appear out of context as a reaction. Reactions need to be somewhat self-explanatory. Another brainier forum I participate in uses 
to reward users for insightful posts; it took me a little bit of head-scratching to get that at first.
With , we’ve been relying on a general knowledge of pop culture (which is my deficiency) plus a general sense of how has been used on the forum. Unfortunately, may have different nuances in other corners of the Internet, so people might be bringing those preconceptions here. We have to cope with that too.
And so what if means someone has raised a topic sure to cause controversy? Shouldn’t that come with a little context, like a link to a previous instance of that discussion, or better yet some documentation of said controversy? If someone is spamming the forum with multiple variations on the same theme, a message to that effect will do.
Chiding community members for their quixotic quests has some precedent in this community. A couple years ago, there were calls to enable this form of self-regulation on the wiki, so I implemented a simple system for that. To my knowledge, it generated no controversy, because anyone who disagreed got scolded. 
I believe that @ZeLonewolf and @Firefishy sincerely only intended to bring some levity to this forum. If they wanted to chase people off the stage, they would’ve chosen something more effective for that purpose, like 
. We need more levity these days in general. Is there another emoji that could have the same effect without as much potential to cause misunderstanding? Can we somehow separate the chiding from the levity? The more varied options we have, the closer a reaction will be to what the reactor really intended.
Interaction design is hard. 