Greetings, Dopers. When did emoticons become emojis? Are they not the same thing?
Don’t need answer fast.
Peace.
They’re different.
Emoticons are made up of regular characters, like this: 
or ;oP
Emoji’s are graphical images that serve the same purpose, but are actual images not made up of characters. These are emojis.
Emojis are fun because there are a lot of them and you can use them in weird ways to get your point across. There’s even a “poop” emoji.
Thanks, GrandWino! Give my regards to you know who with the funny injuries!
There’s more to it than that. Modern emoticons are indeed images like :eek: and :smack: – no longer just ascii art like or (-:<>)
What’s new and different about emojis is that they are an entire character set, with a complete range of defined Unicode points assigned to them. So you can embed them in any plain-text document as long as it’s encoded in some standard format that can encode Unicode points.
Mr. Hanky?
My phone’s keyboard has a whole set of them which can be inserted into emails, text messages, and put into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever. The SDMB doesn’t interpret them well. These are all in color everywhere else: 
It’s not the SDMB. It’s your web browser and your fonts. Some sites have special workarounds that the SDMB doesn’t have. But you’ll find the same issues on Reddit or in an email or Word document.