Laughing out loud, no longer implying either. The most successful acronym in the language; now a full stop with a smile in it.
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First sighting is wrong. Wayne Pearson is where it was first noticed, not where it started. There is an earlier instance I can document, and it is not on the same platform.
The one thing missing from the headnote: LOL landed differently on people who had been online since the 1980s than on anyone who arrived later, and the later arrivals were the ones who spread it.
The simplest definition of LOL is the one you would give a parent, and the reason it is hard to write down is that the parent version is the one that killed it.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
