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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

HN is terrible at interpreting sarcasm or jokes, partly because people will say the most extraordinary things with apparent sincerity.

Sarcasm is also really hard to deal with in text, even for native speakers. And super hard for non-native English speakers.

As do people in most internet forums.

Poe’s law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

> people will say the most extraordinary things with apparent sincerity.

But the level of extraordinary is still far from what 4chan can produce

The whole point of sarcasm is that there’s a chance somebody won’t get it. It is the author trusting the reader in the hopes of making a little connection when the reader gets it. If there’s no chance of failure, the reader doesn’t actually have to get it, so there’s point to the whole exercise. It just becomes a joke in a stilted format. If you ever feel the need to include a /s, just make a normal joke it will be funnier.

Read /s as “NOT” in Borat-voice.

What a strange contention. I don't think I've ever used sarcasm without meaning my audience to understand me. Most movie tropes around it don't seem to be deliberately deceptive either.

I wonder if this is a generational thing?

It isn’t so much that the other party is expected not to get it, just that there must be some possibility. It is like a trust fall. You don’t expect to land on your butt, but you have to engage in the possibility.

On HN, it’s probably best to avoid sarcasm. I’ve used it and it didn’t work out well.

Sarcasm on HN is exceptionally difficult. The closest I've been able to get us deliberately playing around with Poe's Law. The issue with doing so, however, is not being entirely sure if you're getting up votes because people are in on it or think you're serious. And if you let the cat out of the bag and confess to it, it ruins the joke!

Both the reader and the writer are left in this nebulous liminal space of perpetual standoff with no one able to make a move. I quite like it, but it's an acquired taste for sure.

Please stop using the phrase "extremely cringe", and you will immediately be better at writing.

Probably true, but it's not wrong and at least i can take solace in the fact I don't use the sarcasm tag like a dork

> the fact I don't use the sarcasm tag like a dork

Adding insult to insult I see.

edit: please don't feel like you have to escalate your insults towards oxfordmale because I made this comment.

This thread currently contains both people confused by the OP's sarcasm, which didn't have a tag, and people annoyed by the sarcasm tag in a reply.

I paraphrased a sentence from Scrooge (Charles Dickens) in an HN post discussing the plans to allow law enforcement robots to use lethal force. I called it an "effective way to reduce the surplus population". It was meant sarcastically, however, I got downvoted, likely because it was taken too seriously. It is safer to add a /sarcasm tag.

The reason that comment on Christmas was downvoted was likely not because the sarcasm was not obvious (it was). It simply doesn't add anything of value to the conversation. Independent sarcastic remarks tend to get downvoted.

I think this is a horrible idea. Text is a terrible format to convey sarcasm, and it has nothing to do with how good one is at writing. If you must use sarcasm on text based forums like this, it's much better to use an explicit sarcasm marker just to avoid the inevitable 300 response long sub-thread of people arguing about something that was never even intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

That said, it's probably better to just not use sarcasm at all in settings like this.

I kind of feel you, but I got downvoted too often on Reddit because people cannot get sarcasm through text so this might be necessary

Haha! Good sarcasm :)

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