 After a Reddit poster confessed to being not adult enough to be comfortable with the thumbs-up emoji reaction, others chimed in to agree and to call out other common emojis, such as the red heart. Quote, for younger people, the thumbs-up emoji is really passive-aggressive, a 24-year-old Redditor wrote. It's super rude if someone just sends you a thumbs-up, they added. So I also had a weird time adjusting because my workplace is the same.