I wouldn't find it remarkable anywhere else, but Craigslist has built a reputation on not doing this kind of thing.

I wouldn't say so.

I would say it's actually exactly the kind of thing they would do - stick with plain text over things that load slower like images.

Emojis are great for that, they're plain unicode text!

So, why now? Emojis have existed for a while, haven't they? Whereas Craigslist has been using images up until now (at least for the top nav items).

	▲	Grombobulous 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Craigslist has stayed very small in employee count, so I imagine someone was playing around with it and the team just agreed that they liked it.