A serious question about a serious issue for people who think about serious things.

Um, I just realized that I usually use emoticons instead of punctuation marks

You could just get rid of every punctuation and use emoticons only♪

If I use emote at the I never put any punctuation 👀

I've just realised that I mostly avoid the period if an emoticon is present. That's more or less logical considering how weird it looks both after and before the period (but I don't mind how it looks after a question or exclamation mark).

After the period. (^_^)

I always put them at the end of a paragraph (or at the end of one of my weird thought bracket things <.< ) so it wouldn't look too out of place. ^_^
I'm kinda using them as an aid to show what the mood of the paragraph (or at least the end of the paragraph...) or the though was intended to be... Y'know, in a weird alien anti-social kind of way. If only I could use emotes in real life... :D

Why not both :D ? ;D

If I have to put a period, I put the emoticons after it, but if not I just don't put a period at all :^)

When I use an emoticon in the middle of a paragraph, I usually completely replace the punctuation by it ^^ That way there's not the issue of the punctuation making the reader stop reading the sentence chunk.

I think it should go before the period, or, maybe, instead of one. This is a part of a sentence that express emotions. Same as question and exclamation marks, actually. But using it instead of period feels unusual, since we are not used to this kind of sentence end, and may feel that text after the emoticon is a continuation of the same sentence, so I would say using it before dot is the best way.

Period.

if im using a period im not going to use emote.
you know, being serious and stuff!

No poll option for "potato i dont use proper punctuation anyway" ? lol

it you put it in within a sentence, I feel like it doesn't have the same impact O_o. That without the punctuation cutting off the end of the written sentence

What about using non-breaking spaces       ^_^      ? For those not familiar, normally if you put say 3 spaces in a row it will be treated the same as a single space. But you can put   in your comment and it creates a sort of invisible character that isn't reduced back to a single space, so you can put space followed by   and another space and it acts as 3 spaces.

Happy cake day!

Happy cakeday

I don't really use punctuation. That solves the problem :D
Or more precisely I don't really use punctuation in written forms that warrant use of emoji. Short brief forms like texts or chat messages are good for emoji, but not so good for punctuation. (Tom Scott has a nice video on that) Long, more elaborate, formal ones need punctuation, but emojis would be out of place in those. Thus you only use one or another and you don't have to deal with a problem where to put your emoji :)
yes, if you saw that you saw correct and it's deliberate on my end. I use emoji INSTEAD of a full stop to end a message.

Happy cakeday by the way!