I feel the same as a probably lower skill level driver. I was going to come here and complain about the sounds and emoticons, but your post motivated me to look into disabling them. It's not clearly marked in the settings like "disable emoticons".

Display Settings > Car Name Display > Off

I am glad they added Sophy to custom races.

Here for The Great Reddit migration. People left Digg for Reddit for similar reasons. Although the issues with Reddit are magnitudes more concerning.