I am normally not for deleting an emote, but the haHAA emote annoys the hell out of me.
There is not a single situation where this emote is used in a positive context.
It is purely used for bullying and the new “cringe” generation. I dunno, I think it would just be best to be rid of the emote all together. Nothing good comes from having this emote.
My only suggestions i can give to you:
Removing the emote won’t “solve” anything. People will find another emote, or they will just write the text out and it will mean the same thing. How people use an emote shouldn’t be the reason for removal of a global emote unless there is no reason to have it and it is hated by a majority of users. Many people use the emote, many like it (tweets and emails have been sent asking for its removal for very few reasons). I’m personally against removing emotes unless i see a reason for it. “Because its annoying to me” isn’t that strong, people don’t like ‘LUL’ or ‘FeelsBadMan’ (two of the most popular globals, that a majority of people enjoy) but that doesn’t warrant their removal as emotes.
People will use emotes however they want, they will find a way to get whatever message they want across and by association those emotes will be tied to that.
what about the fact that many people use and enjoy using the emote? Don’t you think that that is a good that comes out of it? Especially when you have an option to ignore it?
I would like to shed light on the emote BrainSlug that was a global twitch emote a few years ago. This emote was purely used for racism and baiting people by saying “BrainSlug = Big Nig (no space)”. When the emote was replaced by a litteral brain slug, this stopped happening. Sure, racism got replaced with the TriHard emote, but I personally think the situation now is much better than what it would be if BrainSlug still looked the way it did 2 years ago.
I don’t think “people enjoy using it” is a valid excuse to keep this emote. I know there is nothing objectively bad about the emote, but the culture around it is nothing but negativity and bullying. There is no emote that can replace this kind of “cringe” reaction. I think removing the haHAA emote would result in something similar as the removal of the BrainSlug emote.
BTTV can obviously just say “it is not us, it is them” but as a company, I wish you felt a responsibility on what negative behavior your product can encourage for people. I can promise you that if you added a really really racist and stereotypical emote people would use it all the time, but that does not mean you should do it.
I don’t agree with the comparison tot the “LUL” and “FeelsBadMan” emote. These emotes are used to express your own emotion, not immitating your targets emotion like the haHAA emote is used for.
It’s not getting removed, sorry. People generally use emotes for contextual comparison to feelings. We don’t control the context of emotes we release, much like Kappa didn’t control his context of becoming sarcasm.
P.S. Your comparison to BrainSlug is a terrible one since you’re essentially comparing it to racism. The only emote you could compare BrainSlug to is ANELE because people make similar jokes with it.