I won't LOL anymore unless it's deserved

I had a funny thought the other day. When I'm online chatting to friends or participating in forum discussions I often throw in a LOL, or even an ROTFLMAO, amongst other things. I frequently use smilies winking or just looking happy, sometimes I use the stunned smily, but I actually don't know why I do.

You see quite a lot of the time I'm actually not laughing, or flirting, or anything really. Most of the time in fact my brain is just on auto-pilot, I'm thinking of something else and being polite when I LOL because otherwise the other person has no idea if you're still there or you get what they're saying.

So I kinda made a decision, using acronyms and smilies might be great for online chatting but it's not real, so I'm not going to LOL or ROTFLMAO anymore unless it's really really deserved.

From now on I'm just going to use smilies that only smile, you know just to let the other person I'm paying attention, and if they get upset because I don't laugh at their jokes, well I'll just explain that it wasn't funny and in real life they'd know that because I wouldn't be laughing, and now I won't online either.