Tell me this, what do you understand from this:

• fuck trump
• fuck trump

It looks the same right? And now:

• fuck trump!
• FuCk TrUmP

Somepeople will read this and understand that the first is an insult towards trump, and the second is sarcasm that might be making fun of trump haters.

Text lacks the complexity of vocal speech, no volume, no pitch, no pauses or tonal changes, nothing. We can mitigate it by using different tools such as the upper and lpwer case in unconventional ways, we can use fonts and bold and color and emoji, etc. But this demends effort, sometimes more effort than the actual writing, so people don’t do it.

OP, you suck and you are an idiot.

No, I haven’t noticed it

It’s not a Lemmy thing, it’s an Internet thing.

Truth be told, irony, sarcasm and nuance, are quite hard to do in a text format without being explicit. Hell, that’s the main reason emojis exist, to replace the facial gestures and tone of voice we use to cue each other in on subtle aspects of language like sarcasm.

A lot of irony is supposed to be deadpan anyway (e.g. something like okmatewanker is pretty heavily ironic), but I get people not picking it up because they’re not in the same cultural context. Sarcasm tags make sense because sarcasm is about tone of voice, but a lot of people suggest them inappropriately as sarcasm is more caustic. It’s like telling people they should be offended at your tone!

I mean it’s not just a lemmy thing it’s an internet thing, but mostly common in places people don’t know the autor very well and the autor decides to not use any form of indication they are using sarcasm.

Sarcasm and rethoric questions rely heavily on human conection and being able to read tonal shifts or gestures of the speaker. You don’t have any of that on the internet.

Yes, you can take the absurdity of some claims as an indicator some people might be using sarcasm… Then again you look what is happening world wide, and some of the absurdities being said cannot be taken as someone taking the piss but much rather hey this unknown person might hold this believes.

So when writing and wanting to use sarcasm please be classy enough to leave a clue that it’s sarcasm by using an /s as ☠️ or writting in italics.

I use color-blindness safe color palettes at work even though none of my coworkers are color blind and yet the idea of writing /s for a cynical or hyperbolic comment disgusts me. Eh, pobody’s nerfect ig.

People can be on the spectrum, from a very different culture, foreigners that don’t have English as their first language, or from a different generation with different slang and references. There are lots of reasons why someone might be intelligent but not get your subtlety or references.

You’re on an alternate social media service, which basically caters to the tech-savvy. Most of us are on the spectrum one way or another. Sarcasm and tone are hard to identify in text.

Yes, and it’s really annoying.

You’re on the internet…

Sarcasm is, like, totally for losers.

It’s not that people are incapable of picking up on nuance, it’s got more to do with it being reeaaally hard to convey tone through text. Like it would be hard to fully grasp all the finer points of a psychological movie if instead of watching the movie, all you had was a text version of the dialogue.

Personally I’m a fan of using an ‘/s’ marker, but inside of a spoiler tag.

There’s another recent post wondering about the above average amount of German content here. I think that post and this one are related.

I have been online since the days of BBs in the late '80s. Poe’s law is a real thing. I’ve seen dumber (IMO) and more extreme opinions so much, I can no longer reliably know from some short text alone if this is a thing the person really believes or they’re taking the piss. Sometimes, with enough context, it’s clear, but sometimes a single sentence or two in a response leaves me know real way of knowing (and I don’t feel like trying to read a poster’s entire posting history which may also have more sarcastic remarks in that vein cloaking their real intent/feeling).

nuance and undertone are pretty hard to convey in text for readers. Of course the writer knows whats in his head but how it will convey in others head is sorta gonna be random and even fluctuate based on a point in time. Someone may get it but at a different time and doing other things so that they are not paying as much mind to the post they are reading and fail to.