[deruta]

I concur. Consider TFA. The symbols are not converted to from ASCII smileys and are used like an extension of the charset. Conversely, I remember web chatrooms in the mid-00s, where a colon-paren would always be converted to the service's pallette's rendition of an emoticon, pretty color and 3D to beat.

Plus, there's a question of how people use them, but that distinction I think came later

[msephton]

Interesting to note that I can still type colon-paren today and have it converted, but usually to an emoji instead of the forum smiley gif. On Discord, GitHub, etc