While I love Mattermost as a whole, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the mapping of the smilies, especially :) to the corresponding emoji. It is similar to the one here on the forums 
and I hate it.
You are now welcome to laugh, giggle and/or find this irrelevant.
I think especially within teams that do not meet in person regularly and rely on text chat for most of their communication it is important to have emojis reflecting the basic emoticons somewhat accurately.
If you are still reading :-) :
My problem is that to me the :) smiley is a smiling face. The image to me is a laughing face.
If I wanted someone to know I’m laughing I would use :D.
This one :D -> 
again to me looks way over exaggerated to the original intention. A laughing face with huge eyes is something I know as 8-D (though I rarely use it).
Similarly with the sad smilies. :( maps to 
which to me would much more accurately be written as D-:.
Possible solutions:
- find better fitting images for the smilies
- make an additional emoji set available that represents the classic emoticons more accurately
- make the images only usable through colons, e.g.
:smile:and leave punctuation marks alone altogether
On a general note: Does anybody else find this significant?
so there’s no reason MM can’t follow suit.