Kappa Meaning
Kappa is a greyscale Twitch emote of a past employee of Justin.TV, Josh DeSeno. It shows him giving a smug look to the camera. This emote is widely used whenever the streamer or chat is trolling, joking around, or being ironic.
Kappa Origin
As mentioned above it was simply an image of Josh giving a so to speak “troll face”. There are many emotes of Justin.TV employees making silly faces, but this seems to be the one that started the trend.
There is no exact date of the photo being taken, or it being uploaded to Twitch, but on February 18th, 2012, r/kappa/ was created due to its increase in popularity.
It’s a rather interesting case as to why the emote gained so much popularity, due to the fact that Josh DeSeno never had any online influence before the emote was made. It was of those cases where the community instantly loved it and ran with it.
By February 2014, the emote was being used 900,000 times per day, which is mind-blowing considering Twitch wasn’t even remotely as popular as it is today. By June of the same year, it was being used over 1,000,000 times a day.
Much like Pepe the Frog, this emote has such a cemented history that it has stemmed off into many different iterations.
Kappa Emote Variations
Over the years the Kappa emote has evolved into multiple variations of itself giving new meanings behind each emote. Check out this page for all of the Kappa emotes.
Example
The streamer you’re watching is loading into their first game of Call of Duty Warzone of the day. As they’re about to jump from the plane, they confidently say with a slight smirk, “oh ya this is going to be an easy 30 kill game, I can feel it!”, even though they struggle to break 10 kills most games. Kappa floods the chat.