Mild disagree. Emoji aren't that bad, and certainly have their uses; however, most of the time they look dramatically different than the surrounding text, and can be quite distracting. If they're trying to communicate something important, that works fine, but often the important stuff is buried in the text, and the emoji simply hurt the readability.

Also, there's an issue sometimes whereby people who have nothing worthwhile to say thing that adding a few emoji will now make their message worthwhile...

Hacker News readers exist mostly because this site’s users tend to skew heavily towards people who would make such things.