In case my own personal bias is not apparent, I dislike having this speech bubble icon -->in the ooc tagI don't mind the icon in the hidden text piece, but I hate having it displayed in the shown text.. For me it comes down to use case - I view the ooc tag as something used primarily in an IC block of text, where having an icon disrupts the flow much like having a smilie in there would. For something like the spoiler tag I don't see it as an issue since spoilers are generally sitting outside of IC text so they aren't breaking things up.
Edit: Obviously there would need to be some other formatting to indicate it was an ooc link, so something like dotted or wavy underlining, or a different color text or something.