A small one today: I'm just really appreciative of messaging services with emoji 'React' features. For anyone not familiar/not sure what I'm referring to (though I feel they're fairly ubiquitous now with their arrival on WhatsApp): I mean the ability to tap on an existing message and stick a little emoji on it.
There's a functional utility to it, in that you can e.g. give a light-but-specific signal without advancing or cluttering the main chat. But it also affords two extra effects of note, I think, both of which I'm particularly appreciative.
The first one is just a pure, playfully expressiveness. It almost feels like a little metalinguistic joke sometimes -- finding a weirdly apt or unexpected emoji to respond with. (Although at what point are we just communicating in two parallel languages, using pictograms to mark up another one with things or emotions? I know at least one Discord server that has its own specific emergent mini-lexicon, and I'm sure that's not unique.)
The other is that... sometimes it's hard to know what to say? In many ways, I thrive on text-driven communication. I'm a writer, after all -- it's a space where my brain lives a huge portion of the time. I think it's easy to see the ways that text communication is less emotional, intimate, and personal than in-person interactions. But there are elements that run the other way: it can feel bare, raw; there's no microexpressions, noncommital noises, physical touches or gestures to hide behind. Trying to replicate them in words can work, but also risks feeling trite or dismissive at best. Which often leads people (I'm people) to say nothing. Not because they don't care, but because it's hard to find something to say which is substantive enough to show you really are engaged with this and thinking about it... without, say, derailing the conversation, coming off as flippant, or just asking inane questions.
Reacts actually help a lot with that. They're less committal than words without being meaningless or overly vague. They can communicate something specific, even if it's not bound to an exact semantic space. I find myself using 🙃 a lot, because, isn't that a vibe? Sometimes, they can just show that you're listening.
(I am someone who overthinks written communication in ways that can be very stressful to me, but which are also probably perversely helpful for my job. Reacts and emojis generally can sometimes soften this significantly. I like them.)