Online etiquette and its differences between languages - emoticons, emojis, punctuation, stuff like that

Posts48Likes48Joined23/9/2019LocationNovi Sad / RS
Learning Danish, English, Russian

As someone who's been on the internet for the majority of my life, it has always been very interesting for me to see how people from different cultures with different mother tongues write online. It's so interesting, actually, that I've actually become quite adept at guessing which country someone comes from based on some niche internet thing only people from there use. :)

How do concensuses (is that the right plural form?) like these happen, though? For example, why does the whole world use a semicolon and a closed parenthesis to form a smiley face, like this :) while Russian speakers use just a closed parenthesis like this ) ? Why is "xD" or "xd" widely used in Europe, and seen as cringe in America? Why do Brits add an x to the end of every text? Why are emojis in general so wildly popular among my Chinese students, to the point that I don't know what most of them mean? haha

Are there any online "quirks" your language has? Serbian people in general like adding the letter Y (or a bunch of them) to the end of a word for some reason, for example. What about you?