I’m not really sure what I expect to be done about this, but a user (@muchichka_s) recently mass added frowning emojis to my comments just to be pointy because they disagreed with someone I said in a discussion. I don’t really have an issue with comments getting negative responses per say, but I don’t think users should be able to mass downvote a single person’s comments in rapid succession like was done here since it’s clearly just abuse of the system in-order to smear and/or discreate the user that’s being downvoted. If nothing else there should at least be a limit on how much and how quickly someone can downvote the same user over a certain period of time so the emoji system isn’t abused.
Now calm down. That’s what emojis are for, to show that users don’t agree with your post, don’t agree with you.
Otherwise, emojis have no effect on anything. That’s why I can’t see any abuse.
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Sure, one or two that are left as someone reads through the discussion. But 6 within as many minutes of each other, which wasn’t even enough to time read my comments, and right after we got in a disagreement about something? No. They didn’t leave the emoji’s just because they disagreed with 6 posts over like 3 minutes that they happen to read right after we got an argument. Muchichka_s had been participating in the conversation for at least a couple of months and up liked one of my comments in it recently. So them downvoting my comments in mass was clearly intentional and due to the disagreement. Not because they had just stumbled on the posts and disagreed with them.
If emojis had zero effect no one would leave them. There certainly wouldn’t have been any reason for Muchichka_s to mass downvote my comments if it has zero effect on anything. Even if it’s just purely to smear and/or discreate someone by disapproving of their comments that’s still an effect 
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Similar to this but a different thing: It is a problem when users brigade a message just because they delete it. That gets the message hidden.
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To my knowledge the only emoji having some kind of direct effect is the 
being counted as “Like” in this forum and as such having a minor effect on the trust level of (specially) new users. I think that is what @Mammi71 was pointing out.
All the other emojis are nothing but expressions of personal opinions. The only effect I can imagine is that they make the writer of a post happy (collecting hugs, hearts or smiles) or angry (collecting frowns or angry faces). If that is a problem for you, what is your suggestion? Ask the mods to start evaluating the emojis placed under certain posts and remove those they deem inadequate? Or get rid of the emojis generally?
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I wasn’t aware it had that effect on new users. In this case I think 80% of my comments in a single thread had negative emojis left on them in the same discussion, like 10 or 11 maybe. There’s a point where passerbys will see that all of someones comments are being downvoted, not look to see who exactly did it, and chalk it up to the person having unpopular or socially uncaptable opinions. I could care less if its just one or two messages, but 12 over a span of a couple of hours and in the same discussion is just abnonxious. It at least caused my notifications to be spammed with alerts if nothing else. Although I don’t think the potential reputational damage is nothing.
As to a solution, I think I gave one. A single user shouldn’t be able to spam emojis by downvoting comments from the same users multiple times in the same conversation and in rapid succession. If that means limiting the amount of emotes someone can leave in the same conversation and with the same user to a certain amount, cool. I’m open to other ideas though. As long as it makes it so people can’t use emotes to spam people.
I see nothing wrong with a user adding emoji reactions to a bunch of posts after reading them. We don’t have a clear -1 to react with, just angry and frowning_face emojis, which will need to be resolved at some point.
People reading your messages can see that someone disagrees with them - assuming that’s what the emojis mean. It’s not abuse of the system, and I don’t see that it’s any different if the user adds a +1 emoji or an angry emoji.
I am not aware of any Discourse settings that take into account the type of emojis that a use has received. I think all the reactions could theoretically boost someone in trust level.
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Just an FYI but I’m against mass upvoting as much as mass downvoting. That wasn’t what happened in this situation though so I thought I’d leave my comment to downvotes. That said, if you don’t think it’s an issue for someone to use emojis as a way to spam other users fine. I think it’s one, but whatever. We can leave this for the birds. I still think it’s worth noting certain things sometimes even they aren’t necessarily huge problems in case they become one later or someone has a similar thing happen to them and wants to see if it’s been discussed before. So I’m fine with leaving it that for now if you don’t think it’s a problem.
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Just a sidenote: if I understood correctly that was not the case; the user went on and emoji’d all messages without discriminiation and regardless of content.
It is not very dissimilar from commenting “that’s crap” on each and every message of a user.
Still, I do not think there is much moderators can do about it, since there are some people genuinely think they have to react on everything.
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