Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The voting behaviour around here is .. interesting.
As for the /s, that's because of how humans communicate. Most of our context cues are subliminal, facial expression, tone of voice, body language, eye movement, etc. These account for the bulk of the actual message.
In text based communication like this, those cues are missing entirely. We use emojis and smiley face brackets to give a clue to what is going on.
Then there's the language barrier, people come from different countries with different languages, but also different cultural ideas of what's funny and what isn't. You can tell when you start looking into swearing for example. The Dutch hurl contagious diseases at each other, the Italians diss each others mother, Australians use body parts.
Sarcasm is a special form of interaction, straddling truth and disbelief in some way. It's not universally recognised in the same way since it often triggers off cultural beliefs which vary across the world.
So, to bring all that together, the simple "/s" shows the reader that sarcasm is intended in a more or less universal way. Of course that too has a cultural impact, but that's a rabbit hole I'm not going down today.
Completely agree. First of all the voting behaviour. To me it looks completely like a score if a specific opinion is popular. I see lots of valid arguments (in friendly words) against a popular opinion getting downvoted. Urban legends getting upvoted while the correct answer has 2 upvotes... Things that are the first thing that comes to mind after reading the headline, but not part of the article at all getting a good amount of upvotes...
And with the sarcasm, innuendo, emotions, playing devils advocate... It's a long tradition on the internet to add hints to the text to make that clear. It's not mandatory in any way, but the subtext, verbal clues and facial expressions are definitely missing. Reddit folks have their own jargon with the '/s' etc. Other people use emojis. But even before emojis were a thing, people added ;-) :'-) or XD or other clues.
Sarcasm just doesn't work that well in text comments and it never has.