man cannot live on memes and news alone. there is a void here. news stories breed reasoned discussion, generally filled with stringent, on topic remarks. memes breed tepid remarks, a step above twitter blue check replies, but little worth reading.
what we need is rants. schizophrenic analysis of an old tv show. schizophrenic analysis of taylor swift’s private jet schedule. takes. banter. self-posts, text-posts, and OC content in general.
only about 10% of people in any given community contribute. that means 90% of you are stifling your need to post with other, healthier methods. but i implore: to post is the way. posting is light. posting will bring you a better life, posting will heal your children, grant you a healthy crop, and secure your place in the grand hum of modern discourse
Triggered.
The Internet as a whole lost its goddamn mind around 2016, or at the very least, lost the ability to detect sarcasm. Previous to that, you could say crazy, unhinged things, and people could look at your comment and go, “Haha, obviously this person is joking, they said a funny.” We could just assume a person was being ironic or sarcastic when they were making a crazy statement. Since 2016 though, you have to finish with the /s tag, or else people will jump all over you, even if you’re trying to make a point in support of their actual position. I’ve had plenty of comments where I’m sarcastically trying to make a point, only for someone to reply and bluntly make the argument I was trying to make through sarcasm. Or they’ll accuse you of being x/y/z because people go out of their way to be offended and find the worst possible interpretation of whatever your comment is.
On the one hand, there’s alot of misinformation getting flung around, alot of trollbots and state-actors trying to muck up our democracy, and it’s gumming up the works, but on the other hand, some people just seem like they’ve lost the ability to detect sarcasm.
Sarcasm requires exaggeration. The universe has shown that we weren’t exaggerating enough to outpace the actual wackos.
This happened at around the time when people started having our sarcastic opinions for real.
I’ve noticed that, I can’t even make up hypothetical counter-examples to prove by contradiction, so to speak, because people will read that part and skip the rest of my comment, essentially thinking that I made the opposite point that I meant to
People cannot accept bring the butt of a joke anymore. Ever.
Yes - thank you!! I’m not sure when it happened but the internet defo feels very different when I compare it when I was running a vBulletin forum in the early-00s.
It was very much an anything-goes wind-up fest.
There’s places you can still be sarcastic and ironic. FOr example Reddit’s 2westerneurope4u is good but as a whole everything’s a lot more serious and dour.
I hoped the UK subs on feddit.uk would be less uptight but unfortunately they’re some of the worst for taking things wrong. Whereas on Reddit UK subs they’ll proudly refuse to use “/s” the Lemmy users are just as blind to obvious sarcasm.
Even when I’ve posted videos of British comedy such as Chris Morris it will get donvoted cos I assume people just don’t want to laugh?! You’ll get people commenting seriously about how such-n-such is better or “oh yeah this was funny when it came out but I didn’t like X, Y, Z”.
Like fucking hell guys - when was the last time you all laughed?
I dunno, I’m gonna carry on doing my thing. I refuse to be battered into misery by the cynical masses. :)
GamerGate is around the shift of the internet being srs bzns to serious business. There are a few books on this.
Sarcasm only lasts for 1 internet generation, 4 years. Every 4 years people forget and jokes become serious.