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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I understand the point you're trying to make (e.g. making a hyperbolic claim and leaving the onus on the accused to disprove it), but I think if you wanted to avoid downvotes while making the same point, you might have better luck saying something like:

> How would you feel if I said "<username> is a pedophile! What are you going to do to fight this? Maybe it's just not something worth pursuing?"

And then spend a bit of time explaining why this reasoning doesn't make sense to you. I'm a relative veteran of HN and even I had to do a double-take because I thought you were genuinely accusing the person of being a pedophile.

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Honestly, I really hope that I don't need to explain the logic behind my comment. It should be obvious to anyone willing to spend more than a couple of seconds thinking about it. I would hope that on HN we'd actually try to read and understand the comment we're voting on.

Of course I'm being overly optimistic, but I'd prefer to be naive and wrong than cynical and right.

Sure, and as someone who grew up on Something Awful and 4chan I'm not familiar with the concept of hyperbole and sarcasm, but keep in mind that a lot of people on HN speak English as a second language, or just have more trouble picking up on sarcasm in general, and as such it might come off as a legitimate accusation.

I'm not trying to be the tone police, I don't really care, I was just explaining why you might have been downvoted. Take my statements with as large of a grain of salt as you would like.

English is a third language for me, I would expect that regardless of language everyone can understand the concepts of sarcasm and irony if they're willing to spend any time thinking about what they are reading.

There's literally zero context to suggest that I might be serious in accusing another poster of being a pedophile, even if they were it wouldn't make sense for me to randomly drop that.

> There's literally zero context to suggest that I might be serious in accusing another poster of being a pedophile, even if they were it wouldn't make sense for me to randomly drop that.

Sure, but I think you're overestimating the integrity of the internet if you think that people don't just drop random pedophile accusations for folks that they disagree with. I'm not saying it's "fair", because I get that you were just trying to make a rhetorical point, but I'm saying that people on the internet are often douchebags, ruining a lot of the fun for us. I love edgy humor and sarcasm, between my wife and I we make a ton of off-color jokes, but I usually keep those offline because I don't want to group in with the awful people who misuse them.

The default interpretation of written language is direct rather than ironic or sarcastic.

With “there’s literally zero context to suggest…”, it’s not unreasonable for some to conclude that you were being serious (particularly in light of the general decline of “comments online always make sense in context, so if it doesn’t, you should read deeper”)

> I would expect that regardless of language everyone can understand the concepts of sarcasm and irony

And I feel it's fair for someone like you on HN to accept fair criticism of their comments.

> English is a third language for me

I would expect you'd still understand the point being made and understand it's not about you, but about many others, and just because you understand sarcasm or irony, others might not who aren't as well skilled in English.

> There's literally zero context to suggest that I might be serious in accusing another poster of being a pedophile

Except for the fact that it's a serious accusation that one does not make lightly, and so it's fair to assume no one would simply drop that in civil conversation.

Basically, take the lessons and learn from it and stop arguing.

>And I feel it's fair for someone like you on HN to accept fair criticism of their comments.

I'm happy to accept the criticism, and I acknowledge that people replying to me are mostly correct on the facts.

However, I think it would be a terrible shame to give into this feedback and refrain from using such literary devices out of fear that I might offend someone who doesn't understand the language.

What really bothers is that nobody would ever tell me this stuff if I had written the comment in some other language. Are we supposed to let the English language rot simply because many people are learning it as a second language?

>Except for the fact that it's a serious accusation that one does not make lightly, and so it's fair to assume no one would simply drop that in civil conversation.

You make my point, it's obvious that no one would simply drop that in civil conversation so there must be a deeper meaning to it (as was immediately acknowledged in the very same comment!)

I think it's common for non-neurotypical folks to struggle with sarcasm and irony. Even for neurotypicals, it can go over your head because it's hard to tell tone from a text.

Whether or not you're serious, and forgetting the salaciousness of your satire, there's the point about how completely irrelevant it is as an analogy to what is in question

> there's the point about how completely irrelevant it is as an analogy to what is in question

It's really not irrelevant. It makes as much sense to campaign against my obviously nonsensical allegation as it makes sense to campaign against some random lawyers obviously nonsensical allegation.

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