me_irl

Needs more downvotes

That made me curious about what might be the most downvoted comment on the fediverse

I was one of the downvoters for that one! Good times.

I'm not aware of any other post anywhere ever with over 600k downvotes.

Huh, i swear it's 7 figure, but apparently i remember it wrong.

Most downvoted comment

While the other response is pretty funny if you know what it means, its entirely unhelpful if you don't.

/s = sarcasm

It's to clarify when people are being serious. Sometimes tone is hard to determine over text, so people started using it to show that there is no inner joke, double meaning, or meta humor at play.

I'm seriously, you guys.

/s

The / here is the closing tag indicator, meaning "ends here" and s is "sarcasm", so "sarcasm ends here". If there's text beyond that point, it's no longer sarcastic.

Once upon a time, it used to denote "sarcasm" in Reddit comments. At least 10 years ago, IME, it turned into "sorry for my lame attempt at a joke."

Bots have no sense of humor.

I value internet strangers' feelings too much for that

happy cakeday

I love to forget the /s for a while, to see the reactions!

Also, happy Cake day!

I have autism, so it really doesn't matter how good your joke is, I will misunderstand it in fresh and novel ways.

/s is letting the audience know that it's a joke. If you think that makes things unfunny, then comedy clubs must be awful for you. "Why is everyone laughing, it's obvious he's telling a joke, that ruins the whole joke. Don't they know that ruins jokes? Jokes need to be secretive games where only clever people like me know they're funny in order for it to be funny!"

It's a combination of factors. Language/cultural barriers are a big one. What is obviously sarcasm in your area of the world won't necessarily make sense in another. Add in English as a second language, and it's a crap shoot, even with an obvious joke.

The lack of tonal queues is also a problem. We communicate a lot via voice tone and body language. Without them, what is obvious to you can be read completely differently.

The last is the elephant in the room. Bigots dog whistling. I've seen too many "obviously sarcastic" jokes that are very much not sarcastic in a different group. When those people get called out, they fall back on "it's just a joke", the armour of arseholes the world over. By adding the /s preemptively, you rob them of cover to spread hate. It's a variant of the nazi bar problem.

I choose to believe that there's a strong correlation between being a downvoter and being an unimaginative, humorless bore.

You underestimate the reading comprehension abilities of the average human

Sarcasm is very reliant on tone, which can't be conveyed via text. Intensifiers like "totally" or "definitely" can help, but there are so many horrible people out there now that Poe's Law can make it hard to tell what the true intent is. "/s" has value.

If I saw that number on lemmy I would be very concerned

This is a great comment!

sure it is

Problem with omitting the /s often is, that you can't differentiate between satire and real idiocy. Especially in current times, where more often than not it is the latter, and you don't want to make a potential idiot thinking he's right.

Or because yeah we've seen dumb and evil takes before. It's the internet, even the sane people here are losing it.