I’m the kind of person who likes feedback. I’m about to start my first semester in sociology and anthropology, so I’m interested in culture and language and how people think.

I try my best to understand the people I am talking to – and when I don’t understand it I ask around, google etc. to try and learn.

One thing things that has so far eluded me is the reaction I get from using ‘XD’ (or similar) in comments.

Maybe I’m a bit old (am 24 going on 25) and my internet culture is out of date – I don’t know.

As far as I know, it simply expressed I find something very funny. I don’t use it a lot, and I try not to use it out of place.

It seems to have almost become a trope for poor/ironic humour though – associated with dank memes or some such.

I don’t really know, which is why I’m here asking for help.

What I do know is that when from time to time I will get a significant negative response to using that emote/whatever. I went through my comments by ‘contraversial’ recently out of curiousity, and here is one I found.

Bahahahaha I’m done. xD Here, have an upvote.

I actually got more negative attention for asking people what the response I got ‘eggs dee’ meant than I did for my original comment.

The sub was /r/skyrim, which is large enough that there are different kinds of people there, so I can understand there may be aspects of internet culture I am missing.

Here is another (fairly innocuous IMO) comment of mine along the same lines that is marked as controversial with that little cross.

Made me laugh out loud. Well done XD.

This one is from /r/sneks, which by most accounts is a pretty friendly is a fairly friendly place.

Now, like I said, I like feedback. I don’t like downvotes, but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and identify my own flaws to improve on them.

What I don’t like is being out of the loop. Nobody has ever bothered to tell my why they don’t like these comments – and drawing attention to it seems to be even less well recieved.

One time I even come across an account (a bot, I assume) whose sole function was link an image of a face going XDDD in response to every comment someone made ending with ‘XD’.

I haven’t posted here before, but I’ve heard of the place, and it seemed like the right one to ask. So I’m hoping someone here can tell me: what is going on?

Edit: on reflection, I’ve found even emoticons like ‘:)’ are not well received in many cases. I feel as if people think I’m being smug or condescending, so I avoid often doing so unless I’m confident I will not be misunderstood. Are emoticons in general cliché now?