What do you do with your Steam Emoticons and Backgrounds

Spend months converting them into gems until I hit a bare minimum to create a booster pack, then sell it for $0,10 and call it a day. Rinse and repeat the process in the next 3-4 months. So far I made a whopping $2!

I hoard them, and trade repeats on STM.

To me, they're a side effect of crafting badges, and if any happens to be worth throwing on the market, i do, otherwise they just stack up my inventory, which makes int increasingly harder to load

I sell them as fast as I can, but now have a bunch of untradable and unmarketable ones filling space there.

I usually take them apart into gems.
Some rather expensive backgrounds (sometimes I got backgrounds worth 20-30$) I sold.
Well, I keep some for myself. I like to look at them at night and whisper "My precious-s-s-s-s".

im collecting them, i only convert dupes to gems

I just sell everything that doesn't have 1000s copies already on sale at minimum price and convert rest to gems. The ones that you will actually use on profile or in chat are the only ones worth keeping.

I sell them if they're worth anything, otherwise I turn them into gems, turn the gems into booster packs of badges I still need cards for, and save the cards for the next steam sale that gives you cards for crafting badges.

I keep the ones I like though.

If I don't like them I sell them. If they are low priced or I like them I keep them.

Before the Points Shop came around, I'd post the expensive ones on the Steam Market. Same with duplicates... unless they are so common, I will convert them to gems. Otherwise I'd try to hang onto at least one, because I'd never know if I might wind up using it.

I sell them when I need extra change to buy a game, like when I'm short on cents or stuff so I keep them there in case I need them later on

I collect them because once per a while when i change a pfp i need something to fit

The nice emoticons I use. The others are just part of an ever growing collection. If you have enough of them you can make a pixel artwork with them using the custom infobox showcase.

I check market prices for the items I want to get rid of, then I compare them to the current price of a sack of gems, and decide what to do with them:

• I sell if the profits would let me buy more gems than I'd earn by crushing (not that I actually would, that's just a comparison metric);
• I crush into gems otherwise, or if the item is effectively unsellable (3 cents items from freebies with >1k listings), or outright unmarketable.

For example, all Valve emoticons and backgrounds, including those from holiday sale sets, have a fixed crushing value of 100 gems.
With current prices, 100 gems would cost at least €0.034, so I'd need a minimum sell price of €0.054 (due to market fees) to break even, rounded up to €0.06.
Recent sale items sell for €0.05, which is just slightly below that threshold, so gems it is, since there's basically no way of ever getting a chance to sell at €0.06.

With the introduction of the points shop, I also sell emoticon/background that I want to keep when their sale price is at least equal to the points shop's fixed buying price, then eventually rebuy them with points, since I don't mind them being untradable (effectively selling item tradability/marketability for Steam Wallet).

I’m fond of using emoticons so I do collect those, in case I ever want to use them :P As for backgrounds I usually just keep a few of my favorite ones and trade the rest of them to friends.

I can't understand why some of them are not removable. It annoys me

Absolutely nothing...

i sell them all, unless it's a background i wanna use, in which case i'll do just that. i basically never use steam chat, so no use for emoticons. not that i would really use them anyway.

Bumf

I keep a few useful emotes or backgrounds that I like, but 99% of the time I sell the ones worth anything and convert the rest to gems.

I'm not proud to say this, but I hoard them. And I don't even know why.
Well, I do like using emoticons. But I haven't changed my background since I got my hands on Teacup, the cat background from The Cat Lady.
I kinda collect cat-related ones.
I've sold a few emotes/backgrounds that had a bit of value in the past too.

i like to crush them up into a fine powder and snort them...

I "Ceep" them! Bump.

I go through bouts of increasing my steam level so they all get converted into gems. Higher your steam level the more often steam gives you free money... I mean booster packs.

I turn everything into gems. I don't use emoticons. The one background I really wanted (Jade from MK11) is not the one I got from crafting the badge. So I had to use points to get it -.-