I often use the 🍰 emoji as a reaction, and people sometimes ask why.

For me, it means something similar to 👍 or 🤍, but I choose it when I want to convey that I feel neither direct & businesslike nor deep & personal about whatever I’m reacting to. It’s more neutral. Just a general “hey, cool!” or “heck yeah!”

Oh — there’s a backstory to 🍰, too.

A long time ago, I was reading some W3C CSS working group discussion about pointer events. They were trying to decide how to conceive of user input through the lens of styling (or something, this was beyond a decade ago, I don’t remember). If I recall correctly, someone had the realization that it should just be another form of responsive design — something that varies based on the situation, rather than something where it ought to strive for uniformity. In other words, website authors should have nice affordances to handle mice and keyboards and touch and stylus and other forms each in their own way. And to that realization, Tab Atkins reacted: “🍰”. I took this to mean, “you cinched it!”