Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by isoskeles | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

isoskeles·

People are sarcastic in real life too. “Want a medal?” is usually harmless.

View on HN

Would you drop a sarcastic comment into someone else's conversation in a public space?

The main lesson here, as always, is don't tweet... it's a context-less shitshow.

I've seen it done. Sometimes justified sometimes not, but in no case was either party relentlessly hounded after the immediate incident.

Sure, but it's also not nice or polite. "I'm just sarcastic, I'm just having fun" is a great way to dismiss someone else's feelings when they're actually not happy with your chosen mode of mild meanness.

Speak however you want, but as always people can label you a jerk for anything you want no matter how little offense you intended by it. It's a design flaw in language that's impossible to eliminate.

To people you know and have an understanding with, it might be no problem. To people you don't know, it'll come across as pretty hostile.

Yeah, I'm trying to pick through all the situations where it would bother me. In my imagination, it is limited to (1) if this happened at work (to me or to someone else), I'd see it as toxic or (2) if it happened on the internet, as it did, and it was someone I knew who did it.

And in the second case, it's more of a feeling of disappointment. "I know you're better than this, why are you wasting your time being mean to strangers on the internet?" But I can't quite put myself into the mood of getting angry at them and trying to bully them into deleting their account or even getting them fired from a job. I'm trying to understand that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com