Lol means a lot of things to us. It’s hard to put into language. A signal we’re kidding, we’re uncomfortable expressing an emotion through text, we’re nervous, we don’t want something taken the wrong way, we’re expressing casual empathy. There’s more to lol than laughing, I’m sure someone has done a study on it by now.
"lol" is punctuation. A carryover from a time before we had a thousand different emoji to pick from, and also when casual IM communication was not yet so ingrained our culture that conveying subtle tone came naturally. Lol
It used to annoy me a bit first, but after a while I realised this. It's true. So I incorporated lols in my conversations with millenials, in moderation of course. Definitely an improvement