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
It won’t work. I regularly post banter, irony, sarcasm. But it just gets taken too seriously. People accuse me of having an agenda or seriously believing some of the utterly outlandish things I say.
I’ll sa stupid shit like “the Java programming language causes cancer” and people will think I’m fucking SERIOUS?!
The other day I said the VERY obviously unserious: “Only bourgeois homosexuals and gentrified lesbians use Wayland”.
Bear in mind I’m gay and my that user account has a rainbow flag in it!
One lesbian found it funny and responded. It was mostly downvoted and it lasted 4hrs before getting deleted and my account banned.
I regularly make comments that are blindingly obvious sarcasm - they use utterly ridiculous sentences like the above about “gentrified lesbians”.
Everyone takes them seriously. There’s absolutely NO fucking humour allowed unless it follows a VERY stale Reddit-esque meme format that people are used to.
When someone said they tried meth once and hated it I replied “Skill issue”.
I was battered by downvotes.
Another example: I puffed on a strong vape for the first time one morning and made a WHIMSICAL post of: “WOW! How is nicotine legal!?” - cos it almost knocked me the fuck out. I wasn’t serious!
Dog-piled by people saying - “Yeah well alcohol is legal!” or “What’s your endgame here? What’s the agenda?!”. Or “If this is bait, then you’re pretending to be an idiot. If not, you’re an actual idiot.”
What’s with assuming the fucking worst of everyone’s posts?! What happened to “que sera sera”?
“Yes I’m bragging about fucking my body you well-oiled grape.” - -9 downvotes.
“WELL OILED GRAPE!!!” Oh of course I must have absolutely meant that fuckign classic burn. I don’t even WTF it would mean if taken seriously.
“But if I dropped you in the Pacific ocean you wouldn’t live long.” to a “Hydro Homie” espousing the virtues of water. -8 downvotes (fucking sarcasm!)
“The weight of my intellect is a heavy burden to bear.” - Obvious fucking sarcasm -8 downvotes
“Java devs are the reason humanity will never have FTL drives.” - -3 downvotes. Java devs really have NO sense of fucking humour.
I refuse on principal to add the brain-dead “/s” bollocks for obvious sarcasm. It’s not my problem the world is wet lipped and loose knickered.
The entire fediverse is filled with humourless, miserable, cynical wishy-washy cunts who dont’ spot sarcasm irony or anything unless it’s written in BIG FUCKING CAPITALS.
THIS IS A FUNNY - DONT TAKE SERIOUSLY
To add:
Someone posted in a UK sub asking if a “Good News UK” community would be good.
I commented something like: “It’d make sense to set up and leave it empty while bloicking any submissions cos there’s bugger all good news about this country”
4 DAY BAN but not just from the Good News UK community - from every other community they moderated including the Nature one which pissed me off most of all cos I fucking love British nature!
Hedgehogs are my fave animal and I’ve nurtered some back to health. I love tits and especially the crested tit.
Heaven forbid anyone leave a wry comment! Christ you’ll get banned from fucking everything.
So no, banter is dead. Humour is dead unless it follows a brain-dead Reddit meme everyone understands.
I sometimes don’t get this place. That’s hilarious.
Shit I didn’t know we had so much in common!
[email protected]
I’m wholely in agreement, anyone who entertains the idea of “/s” can get in the fucking sea.
This is just a universal truth. If they had the intelligence for understanding humour, they’d not need such a verbose language.
HumorFactory broke
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.
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.
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.
Sarcasm only lasts for 1 internet generation, 4 years. Every 4 years people forget and jokes become serious.
I think wit is hard over text. To you it’s obvious you’re joking, and that your joke is that this comment is ridiculous.
To others it can read as someone making a joke with little respect for the Original post.
Take the meth one for example, I can see you being downvoted for that if the original post was serious.
The UK one just sounds stupid though, but then again mods of a Lemmy instance are likely to be people that take things (like Reddit fucking their API) quite seriously. This means our population pool may be a little skewed towards the serious.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of humour here. Especially from the AI generated community with their, a’hem, themes.
This is the real answer. :(
I’ll have you know I’m developing an FTL drive in Java, asshole!
No really, I agree with your sentiment. Joking around here is taken at literal face value. Makes it feel a bit stale.
Maybe you forgot the “/s”
Is that why I wasn’t let into Wayland? It all makes sense now
I feel like lemmy was a lot funner a few months ago. Imo, the weeks between the reddit protests and the actual app ban were peak. People were so optimistic and friendly! It really felt like a better reddit. I know that the honeymoon feeling wouldn’t have lasted, but I think the social dynamic here really took a turn for the worse when hexbear first federated. After a few weeks of putting up with them for the sake of giving them a chance, I finally had enough and blocked them, but I feel like their general sense of unhappiness and combativeness has spread. I’m considering laying off this place because it’s getting toxic and I don’t think it’s good for me.
If everywhere you go smells like shit…
I get where you’re coming from, and it would be great if it was at all possible to reliably identify internet sarcasm, but at this point the waters are so muddy it’s impossible to tell. I have absolutely no faith in anyone online at this point, and most of us are here in the Fediverse specifically because we’re so sick of the crazies all over other social media. I can easily believe there are people that would share exactly what you typed above and mean it.
Frankly, sarcasm is already the laziest, most braindead form of humor anyway. If you can’t even be bothered to at least make it clear you’re joking, it’s really a ‘you’ problem if you get misunderstood.
I think I have an idea. When you post/comment, there should be a checkmark for “are you being serious?”. The default value should be chosen on a sub-per-sub basis, so all comments non-serious by default on, say, c/memes, and serious on c/news, for example. Then that information should be hidden unless you downvote or reply to a comment/post of the opposite seriousness to the default of the sub you’re in (I guess there could also be an option to see the warning always or on demand).
I think I should post this properly somewhere but idk where…
Unfortunately it’s because the sheer amount of stupidity in the real world means you can never be sure if someone is being serious. Also unfortunately, when a platform has a wide enough audience there will always be people that have a vested interest in topics no matter how potentially outlandish it might seem. So they will react emotionally to things that for most people aren’t that serious. That’s just my take though. Also add in trolls and that tops it all off.