>I believe that the use of images compared to a forum is what makes imageboard fun and creative. Unlike forums which are more text-based and thus more "stale" and are therefore in need of emojis for expression.
Emotes/emoji/etc aren't typically used for the purpose of fun or creativity (despite us doing so fairly regularly), but rather conveying expression. Also, the vast majority of imageboards are anything but "fun and creative", and most forums totally had images

Hell, I saw more OC in various photoshop and mspaint threads on random gaming forums back in the day than some imageboards have ever had

>doesn't belong on imageboard culture and never has(?).
Emoji was rarely seen on the web prior to 2015 since they weren't added to Unicode until around that time - however, 8chan and a few other places went out of their way to add early support for them once it was viable

4chan briefly had wordfilter-based emotes like we have back in the mid-2000s (some of which were so commonly used they became memes), and text-based emoticon/kaomoji usage was also very common there until around 2008 when teh n00bs decided they were too cool and grown-up for them (it was also around that time that "reaction images" really began taking off)

For what it's worth, it's not unusual to see the occasional emoji on Futaba, and they're fairly common on 5ch and other 2ch-type boards. And it should go without saying, the Yotsuba emotes we're using right now were taken from a previous imageboard...

>To add more onto that will ... feel off and weird?
We've expanded our emotes a few times, and both kaomoji & several additional forms of text formatting have been added several years into our existence

It's very easy to adopt the mindset of "X is abused on other websites, so we shouldn't have it on Heyuri" - while that does apply to a small number of things (o hai Rule 8), adopting too much of that mindset would have prevented us from having or doing pretty much anything we currently have or do (including having an imageboard!)

Teh Heyuri way is to ignore what others do with X, to look at X with fresh eyes, and to come up with new/funny/interesting ways to use X. Our motto (nevar said before): If it's Heyuri, X won't suck!

Disclaimer: X may still suck